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A Year After Fighting for Her Life, Wheeling Teen Gets Accepted to U.S. Naval Academy

7 min read

WHEELING - March 15 will be a day Olivia Kiger-Camilo will never forget. It was that day this year that The Linsly School senior received a phone call from U.S. Sen. Shelly Moore Capito, R-W.Va., with news that Kiger-Camilo received a commission to attend the U.S. Naval Academy.

But that's not the only reason that day is so important for her.

It was on that day in 2022 that Kiger-Camilo found herself in a hospital bed at WVU Medicine Children's Hospital in Morgantown hooked to a ventilator. A flesh-eating bacteria had sunk its teeth into her left foot. Her hopes of attending the Naval Academy took a back seat to the hopes of her surviving the ordeal and being able to lead a normal life.

Kiger-Camilo didn't just survive. She thrived. She overcame disease and pain and, in less than a year, showed the Naval Academy that her body, mind and spirit were strong enough to join its ranks. It's a journey she and her family say would not have been possible without the support of the Ohio Valley community that surrounded her.

A Visit Becomes An Obsession

Kiger-Camilo's desire to attend the Naval Academy was born from a football game. In September 2021, she and her family went to a Marshall-Navy game in Annapolis, Maryland. Many of Kiger-Camilo's relatives are Marshall graduates. They thought it would be fun to take in a game at Navy.

As soon as Kiger-Camilo stepped on Navy's campus, she fell in love.

"It kind of just stuck with me and I was like, 'I have to go to this school,'" she said.

It's a desire that many have, but few experience. Fewer than 10% of those who apply to the Naval Academy are accepted. According to the academy's figures, in 2020 it received 15,699 applications. It offered appointments to 1,426 students, a rate of 9%. A total of 1,194 students were part of that class, a rate of 7.6%.

Kiger-Camilo was undaunted. The more she researched the academy, the more people she talked to, the more she wanted to attend.

"After visiting, I became sort of obsessed with it," she said.

The path to Annapolis, however, took a grueling, painful detour.

In March 2022, Kiger-Camilo came home from a dance competition and began suffering through excruciating pain in her left foot. During a trip to WVU Medicine Wheeling Hospital's emergency room, no treatment or medication could deaden the pain. Her temperature then jumped to 103 degrees and her blood pressure plummeted. She was taken by helicopter to WVU Children's.

There, doctors found she had developed necrotizing fasciitis in her foot and was in septic shock. She was intubated and sedated. She underwent multiple surgeries to clean the necrotic tissue from her foot and then to graft skin onto her foot. She spent, in total, a month in the hospital.

Despite all that, Kiger-Camilo was undeterred in her goal to attend the Naval Academy. Reaching that goal, however, became much more difficult. Part of the acceptance process is the Candidate Fitness Assessment, a battery of physical tests including push-ups, crunches and a 1-mile run. To help her accomplish it, her father assumed a role beyond that of parent.

"If she did not have the dad she has," said Kiger-Camilo's mother Rebecca Kiger, "it would not have happened."

The Long Road To Annapolis

Kiger-Camilo's father, David Camilo Reyes, is a physical therapist. With his daughter's future at stake, he had to strike a delicate balance. He had to be a physical therapist who would push his patient to recover the motion and function she lost in her left leg. He also had to remain her dad who loves her and wants the best for her.

"It was really difficult," he said. "Because, as a therapist, you have to be firm. I could see the journey she went through and also how much she wanted to meet that goal."

To reach that goal of the Naval Academy, Kiger-Camilo had to start with more basic goals.

"She couldn't walk," Camilo Reyes said.

Kiger-Camilo has always been very active. She runs track for Linsly and has been a longtime dancer at Turn It Out Academy. Still, she understood that her journey would consist of many smaller steps.

"When I was sitting in my bed, not being able to walk, not even being able to walk to the bathroom by myself without a walker or someone to help me, thinking about having to run a mile for the test to be accepted or doing a push-up was so overwhelming. So creating very small goals along the way made that journey bearable."

Those goals included standing on her foot bearing full weight, walking for a couple of hours without stopping and walking into the ocean. As those smaller goals got checked off, the bigger ones came into clearer focus.

Kiger-Camilo's goals for the assessment test were lofty. Internally, her father wasn't sure if she could reach them. He saw how damaging the bacteria was and what she had to endure just to walk again. But he wanted her to have those expectations. He knew it would spur her to work harder.

"You cannot pass through that if you're not constantly pushing," Camilo Reyes said. "If you give just 80%, you don't get there."

On the day of her fitness assessment in December, even though the doubts still lingered in the back of her mind, Kiger-Camilo went all out, passing the tests with flying colors. She even reached the maximum needed for push-ups, knocking out 50.

Then came the months of waiting to see whether Kiger-Camilo would be one of the select few to join the Naval Academy's incoming class, a wait that ended with Capito's phone call.

"It was surreal, and I’m very grateful that I got to experience it with my friends and family and people who could really care for me and support me," she said. "I had really been struggling leading up to my acceptance with the memories of what happened to me and trying to believe that I could move past it. And so getting the call from Sen. Capito that I had been offered an appointment to the Naval Academy was the ultimate sign that all of this work was done and that there was a bright future."

What The Future May Hold

Plenty of people have offered their congratulations to Kiger-Camilo, especially after emerging from an intensive care unit just a year ago to receive a commission to the Naval Academy. Some of those people mention how much they look up to her. That feels strange to her, as she and her family know that the community's rallying around her during her ordeal was what made this possible.

"The heroes are the people in the community that got behind her and that got behind us," Kiger said, "that prayed, that brought us food, that visited us, that gave us money so we could breathe a little bit while we went through this recovery. There is no way she could have done this unless there were so many people behind her, even if she’s never seen them before."

Now Kiger-Camilo can focus on what lies ahead. When she gets to Annapolis, she's considering studying chemistry and commissioning into the medical corps. Her experience in the hospital stirred an interest in medicine. She's also considering commissioning into the Marines and studying political science or international affairs.

Either way, she heads into the next phase of her life knowing that her parents and the rest of her family are extremely proud and that an entire community wants her to succeed. She doesn't feel that she's reached the finish line, just another stage of the journey.

"I’m thinking of this as just the beginning, but I’m trying to feel a little bit of pride," she said. "Not too much, because I’m about to be surrounded by thousands of excellent Americans. But I’m just feeling a lot of gratitude and excitement for what’s to come."

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