The CDC Has My Cell
Teachers love to regale one another with memories of all the things which have gone wrong while guiding young people through educational experiences. Our spookiest stories are usually shared over a goopy noodle casserole while keeping an eye on the sophomores at table 6, rather than around a picturesque crackling campfire. The good ones, though, are still able to make a first year biology teacher who has just signed on to coach the JV soccer team pause between lunch bites in full fluorescent daylight. Despite this reaction, she won’t be deterred by these horrors. Teachers are unshakable. My own cautionary experience proved that very idea, and I hold on to memories of my own resilience with honor.
Band trips are often some of the most memorable experiences for high school students. Even if you weren’t a card carrying member of all the best nerd clubs like I was, you can probably imagine some daily activities: apologizing to the front desk about kids peeing in the hotel pool, keeping percussionists in their own rooms, watching parent chaperones try to unsuccessfully hide a flask of whiskey between sips during a pre-bedtime meeting, updating the cross-referenced itinerary notebooks when a tour of Rockefeller Center cancels due to maintenance (etc, etc).
I took 200 band members and parent chaperones from a small(ish) sized town in Kansas to New York City in March of my third year of teaching. I was 24 years old. This wasn’t the first band trip I’d led, but it was certainly the largest and longest. As we departed the city for our midwestern home after four very full Big Apple days, I settled into my bus seat which was covered in fabric that looked more like a casino floor than a cozy chair. I started to chat with a college friend who had agreed to come on the trip as my personal sanity chaperone. We'd been awake since 3 am that morning in order to see the taping of "The Today Show", and were exhausted. Slap-happy and relieved to be on our way home, we giggled about all the things that had gone wrong during our visit. I took some joy in reflecting on the events that had taken place over the last few days, and wrote them down on a little slip of paper. Shuffling down into finding a comfortable position to sleep, I envisioned my future self re-reading the list of odd and irritating moments from the past few days I’d scribbled on a slip of yellow memo paper for posterity. I knew someday it would seem so silly that I had to fight back feelings of wanting to dismember our tour guide for leading us the wrong direction down 49th St for thirty minutes. It seems that perspective, unlike revenge, is a dish best served piping hot.
Our first stop to fuel up was just outside the city. While I was monitoring the line for the bathroom, a freshman girl tapped me on the shoulder and murmured “my stomach is hurting”. I assumed she had eaten too much candy, as most 9th graders do on their first long trip away from home, and told her to just let me know if it got worse. I didn't think twice about it before we loaded back up on our three busses and began the long trek back to Kansas.
About 45 minutes later, I got a text from the bus three chaperone: “Lots of kids throwing up on bus 3, pull over”.
From that point on, we made so many stops on I-80 throughout the night that I lost count and sense of location. We had to pull over every 30-45 minutes for the next 7 hours in order to let more and more kids get sick on solid ground, rather than on a moving bus. We bought every trash bag and paper towel at every rest stop to restock for the next round of bus cleanup. One stop included flinging student luggage into a ditch while we searched for insulin for two students whose blood sugar levels had been fluxing greatly throughout the night.
One by one, sickness spread from the back of each bus to the front. Stress was high among students and chaperones, and only worsened with the inability to sleep while surrounded by illness. Around 7 am, one student began to have a panic attack in the middle of a TA Travel Center candy aisle. After two hours of unsuccessfully attempting to calm her, the attendant on duty offered to call the paramedics for help. When the ambulance arrived 20 minutes later, students staggered toward the white-clad EMTs. The medics stared wide-eyed as dozens of teenagers begged them for something which would make them stop throwing up.
A large crowd of high school students, three large motorcoaches, and one silently screaming set of ambulance lights caught the attention of police driving past on the highway. Two officers parked on the side of the gravel hill where our caravan had set up shop and approached us with caution. After a long series of Five W questions, the two police officers escorted all three busses to the nearest hospital in Mount Pleasant, PA. For those of you keeping score at home, that is 4.5 hours from New York on the map, but almost 12 hours since we left the city and a full 31 since I’d slept.
We landed at the community hospital a few miles down the road with one doctor on staff. Along with the nurses and hospital assistants, he treated over 100 of our students and chaperones for nausea and dehydration. Thankfully, I had two nurses as parent chaperones, and they tirelessly worked to get kids checked-in with their health insurance and medical history. Once I was sure that my students were in good hands, I sped off to contact parents and answer texts from the principal, who had been on the trip with us until departing early to attend an athletic association meeting.
Unfortunately, the hospital staff told me that there was no guest wifi for me to use, and so my only option was to trudge through patchy on-board bus wifi to send a mass email to parents. After 45 minutes of constantly refreshing my school outbox server, my message leapt into cyberspace and I looked up to see one of our bus drivers standing over me. He told me we were dangerously close to running out of time on their allowed awake time. As a safety measure, contracted drivers can only go so long before they must stop and sleep. I begged him for a solution that would allow us to keep going home. Finding lodging for that many people in the middle of Pennsylvania and keeping sick kids from their parents added up to a big problem in my head. He agreed to continue as long as they could and turned away from me to call the bus company. Grateful and feeling a moment of relief, I hopped off the bus onto the gravel lot next to the hospital and felt my phone buzz in my pocket. A voice on the other end of the line introduced himself as a reporter, and asked if he could talk to me a bit about the situation at the hospital.
The reporter was from some AP news source. He’d received my personal number from a parent back in Kansas, and began firing off questions as soon as I answered. “How many of your students are sick? Where did you take them that got them sick like this? When will you be home?” Startled and upset, I told him to contact the school district for any comments. My music education degree did not include a class on crisis communication, and I wasn’t about to say something which would end up making things worse.
As I hung up, I caught sight of more news reporters and helicopters circling the hospital where all of my students sat inside, either hooked to an IV in a hospital bed or eating a vending machine lunch. I ran directly toward a group with recorders and memo pads standing in front of a news van in a way which I’d like to remember as the act of a heroic guardian, but was likely a bit more like one of those wacky inflatable tubes waving in front of car dealerships. The last thing I wanted for my sick students was to deal with adult strangers harassing them for disaster follower content. The internet had already proven to love sad band kids, and there was no way I was going to let a video of a barfing tuba player circle the web. After insisting that they would never be allowed to chat with any students or chaperones and shooing them off, I answered a few questions for the PR rep for the hospital. She agreed that she'd keep the reporters away from all of my students.
Six hours of medical treatment and far too many zombie movie references later, the saints of this small county hospital released us. We started back home, cases of anti-nausea medication in tow. Although there were still some bouts of nausea, we had minimal issues for the remainder of the trip. I remember finally falling asleep sometime around midnight and waking up to someone drearily saying “oh, Courtney is throwing up”. The next morning, as we finally arrived back to the school parking lot, a few students around me were laughing and singing. We pulled up to signs, and cheers, and a crowd of parents whose worried looks subsided as the bus doors began to open.
I pulled out my phone to take some pictures when another unknown number popped on the caller ID. I answered the call with a tone of voice I haven’t used since I was 15 and offended by all requests made to me by my mother, expecting another reporter on the other end. Instead, an agent from the CDC introduced herself and asked if I had some time to talk.
In the weeks that followed, I had dozens of phone conversations with the New York, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and National Centers for Disease Control. Students and parents filled out three different surveys detailing where they had been during the trip. The doctor of the hospital wrote an email to the school district superintendent casually nominating me for mayor of the town where I taught. After numerous hypothetical diagnoses, they determined we had caught norovirus, often called “cruise ship syndrome”. It's hard to tell where it originated, because it spreads so quickly through the air. The worst cases are where many people are in a contained area, like a cruise ship. Or a bus.