By Kelly Shoff,Senior Video Producer
Camper For Life
EPIC Account Manager Lexi Chopp’s life was forever impacted by Camp One Step. Having attended the camp as a young person when fighting metastatic bone cancer, she still donates her time to serve the camp today. Hear her inspiring story below.
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Transcript
The summer I turned 13, I was in a pretty dark place. I was struggling a little bit in terms of connecting with my peers. Camp One Step truly changed my life. My name is Lexi Chopp, and I was diagnosed with metastatic bone cancer when I was five years old.
Camp One Stop is an organization that provides free year-round programs for children with cancer and their families. It’s not therapy camp. You don’t go and sit in a circle and talk about your cancer. You go and do normal summer camp things with a group of people who have this shared unspoken understanding of what you’ve been through. That ability to fit in so quickly and feel comfortable was huge for me. I have lots of close, lifelong friends that I met as a camper, and I also met my husband at camp. We’ve been married going on five years this fall.
Some of the lessons that I’ve learned at camp that apply to my day-to-day work at EPIC are flexibility and empathy. Those are both super important. We don’t always know what someone else is going through. So go in with a little bit of extra understanding and a more gentle approach and flexibility, just from the perspective of the best-laid plans are still bound to have a hiccup. Knowing how involved EPIC is in the local community—in businesses, in organizations—that was really important to me. One of the ways I describe myself is scrappy. Scrappy, honest, kind, is the EPIC motto. That was kind of a little nod from the universe, like “This could be good for you.”
