Brenda Batts, pediatric supervisor at Hughes Spalding Children’s Hospital, leads a game of “Asthma Monopoly” at Camp Breathe Easy. The games are meant to be fun and help campers learn to manage their asthma.

As the pediatric supervisor at Hughes Spalding Children’s Hospital, Brenda Batts, MPH, RRT, spends most of her days caring for children with every kind of breathing trauma — from accidents to pneumonia to severe asthma.

One week a year, she swaps scrubs for shorts to become a counselor at Camp Breathe Easy.

“I love it,” Batts said. “Doing all the activities makes me feel like a little kid again, but most of all I get to see the other side of my patient’s lives. Here, they’re not in the middle of a medical emergency; they have a chance to play.

“They also get to see that I’m not just that scary person in a white coat at the hospital that pokes and prods them. I’m a real person, who likes to have fun, too.”

For 25 years, the American Lung Association’s Camp Breathe Easy has been offering children with asthma a chance to do what other kids do in the summer. For a week, they live in cabins and fill the days with swimmming, biking, canoeing, rappelling, tennis, basketball, archery and arts and crafts at Camp Twin Lakes in Rutledge.

The largest asthma camp in the Southeast, Camp Breathe Easy is made possible in part because respiratory therapists, nurses, pharmacists and doctors volunteer to serve as counselors and medical professionals. Many of the 200 kids who came this year heard about the camp from their medical practitioners. Some received “camperships” to help pay the $230 fee.

“We monitor them 24/7 and there’s an infirmary for emergencies, but the idea is to help them have fewer episodes by teaching them how to manage their own disease,” said Calvin Calmes, RRT, emergency room supervisor at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. “These are smart kids, so if you make the instructions so they can understand them, they can take better care of themselves.”

When not doing outdoor activities, the children play educational games, like “Asthma Monopoly,” “Who Wants to Breathe like a Millionaire?” and “Smoker’s Roulette,” where they spin a wheel and learn about diseases caused by smoking.

“We watch educational videos and compare a healthy pig’s lung with a diseased one, to talk about the dangers of smoking,” Batts said. Tests taken before and after playing the game tell counselors how much the kids have learned.

Simon Sotillo, a respiratory therapist at Northside Hospital, teaches tennis at Camp Breathe Easy. This is the sixth summer that Sotillo has volunteered at the camp.

“Managing a chronic illness takes discipline, and kids have different personalities, so we try to make the learning interactive and fun for them,” said Simon Sotillo, RRT, NICU, a respiratory therapist at Northside Hospital.

Children in Georgia miss more than a half-million school days each year due to asthma, according to an American Lung Association of Georgia and Georgia Department of Human Resources Division of Public Health report. The inflammatory disease that narrows airways and causes breathing difficulty is on the rise, in part because of pollution and decreasing air quality.

As kids learn about their symptoms and different ways to prevent asthma attacks, they gain independence and self-confidence. The camp also encourages them to lead fuller lives.

“I teach the kids tennis and I see some naturals out there,” Sotillo said. “I tell them about other athletes who have asthma, and tell them that they can go as far as they want to go, if they play by the rules.

“They have to learn to manage their disease. I tell them, ‘you can’t play tennis in flipflops, and you can’t participate in a sport unless you take your medication.’ ”

Seeing the campers make progress, with the older ones helping the younger and teens returning to become leaders in training, is the kind of reward that keeps volunteers returning year after year. Sotillo takes vacation time to attend.

“It’s not really a vacation. We’re doing things from 7 in the morning until about 11 at night, and one of my campers had a middle-of-the-night episode, but it’s fun and it’s for a good purpose,” Sotillo said.

Since the camp has to limit the number of campers based on the number of health care workers who volunteer, the American Lung Association is always looking for new recruits. “We especially need more men,” said June Deen, vice president for public affairs.

To learn more about the camp, call 770-434-5864 or visit www.alaga.org.