PHOTO ESSAY: Summer camp for kids with autoimmune diseases

CLARYVILLE, N.Y. (AP) — Autoimmune diseases like lupus, myositis and forms of arthritis can strike children, too. At a sleepaway camp in upstate New York, some young patients got a chance to just be kids.

That’s how a 12-year-old recently diagnosed with lupus found himself laughing on a high-ropes course as fellow campers hoisted him into the air.

“It’s really fun,” said Dylan Aristy Mota, thrilled he was offered this rite of childhood along with the reassurance that doctors were on site. If “anything else pops up, they can catch it faster than if we had to wait til we got home.”

Autoimmune diseases occur when your immune system attacks your body instead of protecting it. With the exception of Type 1 diabetes, they’re more rare in kids than adults.

“It’s very important that people know that these diseases exist and it can happen in kids and it can cause significant disabilities,” said Dr. Natalia Vasquez-Canizares, a pediatric rheumatologist at Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in New York.

When symptoms begin early in life, especially before puberty, they can be more severe. Treating growing bodies also is challenging.

Montefiore partnered with Frost Valley YMCA to bring several children with autoimmune diseases to a traditional sleepaway camp, after reassuring parents that doctors would be on hand to ensure the kids take their medicines and to handle any symptom flares.

“Their disease impacts how they can participate and a lot of the time the parents are just very nervous to send them to a summer camp,” Vasquez-Canizares said.

Ethan Blanchfield-Killeen, 11, has a form of juvenile idiopathic arthritis, causing joint pain and stiffness and “my legs get, like, sleepy.”

But at camp, Ethan said he’s mostly forgetting his illness. “The only time I get pain is like when I’m on long walks, my legs start getting stiff, and then I kind of feel pain, like achy.”

One day a doctor examined his hands at camp. Another day, he was running across the lawn splattered in a fierce game of paint tag.

“It’s really nice just doing the special activities and just messing around with your friends and all day just having a blast.”

To the doctor, forgetting their chronic disease for a little bit was the point.

“They blend perfectly with the other kids,” Vasquez-Canizares said. “You can just see them smiling, running, like any other normal child.”

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Neergaard reported from Washington.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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This is a documentary photo story curated by AP photo editors.