But they were, and for some of these kids, the experience has already proved life-changing.
A summer spent at Stage Door Manor, a children's camp in upstate New York for budding thespians, proved life-altering.
The Houston pediatric hospital is asking nursing mothers in the area to donate their excess milk, which has proved life-saving for prematurely born babies whose mothers are unable to produce enough to meet the infant's needs.
Watching her husband become distressed and then destroyed by the disease proved life-changing for Tait, who engaged in a protracted battle over the occupational nature of the illness.
*While high-dose statins have proved life-saving and even low-dose Mevacor can lower cholesterol, Merck never proved that a mere 10 milligrams a day would prevent heart attacks in moderate-risk patients.
Instead, Eminem, born Marshall Mathers, explained to filmmaker Matthew Cooke that it was prescription drugs like Xanax and Valium that proved life-threatening.
When that proved life-affirming, but cost-prohibitive, she decided to ramp up production, hoping to sell enough of the overrun in concert parking lots to cover expenses and fund her higher calling.
Another experience that proved life-changing for Ruby was accompanying students and staff on Cedarville's annual Civil Rights Bus Tour, an intensive four-day trip in which students sleep on a bus, watch provocative movies about America's racial history like John Singleton's Rosewood, and visit historic sites in the Deep South.
Along with the research being done that has proved life-saving in some cases, some Silicon Valley start-ups (one being uBiome) have risen to the challenge of trying to make sense of the data that could one day (soon) come from sampling a wide array of personal microbiomes.
But as she lived on, and on, she became famous, first in her home town, Arles, in southern France, then nationally, and eventually as the person with the longest proven life of anyone in history.
