After a year of pain, a joyous Isabella heads to camp

Nine-year-old Isabella McCune danced along the sidewalk outside the Arizona Burn Center in Phoenix and turned a cartwheel.

“I’m so excited, I can’t stop moving,” she said.

Isabella was waiting Sunday to board the bus to Camp Courage, a week-long, free summer camp for young burn victims put on in Prescott by the Arizona Burn Foundation.

Isabella suffered third-degree burns over 65 percent of her body in an accident in March 2018. She was released from the hospital in December after 276 days and more than 109 surgeries and procedures. She kept her spirits up with visits from friends and family and from her favorite singer, Taylor Swift, who came to see Isabella in May.

As she endured painful treatments, her doctor, Kevin Foster, promised her she would go to the camp.

Isabella had been packed for days. She had Star Wars sheets for her bunk and a silver angel etched with the words, “Always by my side.”

“I’m excited for all the activities,” Isabella said. Rock climbing. Horseback riding, Canoeing.

“Camp is like a big family,” Alexis Stokes, 17, told Isabella. This is Alexis’ sixth time attending camp. She was 11 when she was burned when gas exploded near a bonfire, just like Isabella. “You feel like you actually belong there.”

It helps Isabella to see that the other kids are like her. “I don’t get happy that they’re burned, but I get happy that they can relate to what happened to me,” she said. No one will stare at her scars. They have their own.

Symphony Windahl, who’s 9, shyly asked Isabella her name. It’s Symphony’s fourth time at camp.

The girls are the first ones on the bus, sliding into a seat together. “They’re besties already,” Isabella’s mom Lilly McCune said, watching from the curb.

“There’s no room for tears here, Mom,” Isabella’s dad J.D. McCune said.

He leaves his sunglasses on so no one sees his own tears.

There have been enough of those.