Model Therapy Cat

I had a nice time at one of my regular hospitals yesterday. We started off by stopping by the Cancer Center. They were changing things around there for months and moved the patient appointments to another hospital branch. So it had been a long time since we’d visited it. But they are back having patients again, and I visited with several people in the waiting room. The only patient receiving chemo was napping, so I didn’t get to see them.

The rest of the visits were either children or staff. I saw lots of staff! I was the only therapy animal working that day, so my human let me walk on my leash in the hallways. That way lots of people got to see me and pet me. I enjoyed that a bunch.

The Pediatrics section was a little bit quiet. I saw one boy who was in a lot of pain from some sort of operation on his nose. My human is always cautious when a patient is really hurting because she figures they won’t want to see me. But this boy did want to pet me a little while the nurse was off getting him something to help him breathe. I also saw a little girl who was sitting up in bed. She asked if I might scratch her, and my human assured her I was very sweet and would never do such a thing. So she petted me for a while.

The last children I saw in Pediatrics were a little girl patient and her sister. The patient was in a crib with the bars up and she had been crying. But when her mom put down the bars and set her down next to me, she was happy and was actually very gentle petting me. She did keep trying to grab my ears, and my human fixed that by “helping” her in a way that actually kept her from squeezing them. The girl’s sister was very chatty, but my human couldn’t understand a word she said! Sometimes she understands young kid language even less than she understands Spanish.

After that, we went to the Rainbow Room, and it was packed! As I’ve mentioned before, the Rainbow Room is the waiting room for young outpatients with developmental disabilities. Sometimes they can be a little rough or noisy, and not every therapy animal can deal with it. I can, but my human is very careful to make sure I don’t get stressed out. The receptionist announced in Spanish that the kids could have their photo taken with me (yes, my human understood that!). So it turned out that the easiest thing to do was to sit me on one of the blue kids’ chairs next to a low table, and have the kids sit on the table next to me. That made everybody happy — the kids, the parents, and me. So I was sort of a model therapy cat for the day!

Because there were so many kids, I spent a lot of extra time at the Rainbow Room, and I finished up by walking through the hallways on my leash back to the area where we sign out. It was a very full day, and really productive.

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