Tag Archives: Children’s Hospital Boston

Tools of the Trade

Cheap rubber bladder

Ever since the Big Apple Clown Care Unit started up at Boston Children’s, we have prided ourselves on our exhaustive Research and Development program. One of the items that underwent close scrutiny is known familiarly to most of you as the “whoopee cushion.”

Hospital management wanted me to take them away from the clowns, but I pleaded with them, saying, “That would be like taking the color red off an artist’s palette. ”

A whoopee cushion is a critical tool (combined with facial expressions and physical movement) that is understood in any language. Kids love it because it’s bathroom humor, but this was a problem in the hospital. Maybe some young patients were hospitalized for malfunctioning excretory functions! Toilet humor is not a road to travel in the hospital for sooooo many reasons. ( Do not follow the yellow drip road.) It also encourages “potty mouth” among the siblings and adolescents.

Chemical gel – FLARP

Do you realize in less than a decade, we have seen the whoopee cushion go from a cheap rubber bladder, to a chemical gel, to a fat rubber hose with two hard plastic ends, to a remote-controlled electronic device, to a self inflating cheap rubber bladder? Who got the grants for that technology?

Due to hygiene and  latex allergies, the electronic device is my instrument of choice in a hospital setting.

I have found it interesting and challenging to use it as a silly little sound and incorporate its use in musical numbers or in hearing tests along with squeakers.  

I like is to let my clown partner hide the main console of an electronic fart machine  in one of their pockets, while I control the remote. Things just slip out as they do and the kids crack up as we try to maintain some kind of composure and dignity!

Use this for high-tech bathroom humor!

Self-inflating rubber bladder. Works every time!

Funny what kind of sound those elevator or vending-machine buttons can make when you least expect it…

“Le tooter”

“Seize” You Later!

My Pleasure?

Sometimes kids with unexplained seizures are hospitalized so that their brain activity can be monitored. So they are outfitted with electrodes hidden underneath a kind of muslin turban. Then they wait, sometimes days, for a seizure to occur.

Making clown rounds among these patients always involves a familiar scenario: Mom or Dad is looking at the child, knowing something is wrong. The child, staring back, is thinking, “I know something’s out of whack, but why is nothing happening?”

One day my partner and I were invited into the room of a teenage boy. The father looked at the kid, the kid looked at the father, the father looked at the mother, the mother looked at the kid, the kid looked at the mother. The ritual repeated. Until we arrived.

I asked the Dad if he had any money and started playing a little street shuffle called “two card monte”  with Dad and the kid.  (The person who holds the cards controls who wins, and I made sure the kid always won.) When I got the Dad up to 35 cents, the kid was thrilled! He was winning!

I told Dad it was time to pay up, and my partner and I started to leave. Just as we were walking out of the room, alarms began sounding, bells started ringing and the medical staff came flying into the room.  I thought for sure one of us had tripped over something. Regardless, we had been trained to scram in this kind of emergency, so my partner and I stepped into the next room.

Later, after everything calmed down, we were walking past the teenager’s room when his mother literally grabbed me. “Thank you so much for giving my son a seizure!” she said.

I was devastated. My jaw dropped. I just looked at her and asked,”Is this a good thing?”

“We have been waiting three days for it,” she said.

“Well, then, it was my pleasure!”

I immediately went down to the charge nurse and said,” I just gave someone a seizure. Should I call my lawyer?”

She replied, “That’s great! See if you can give one to Room 324. She has been here for more than a week.”

Apparently the boy’s seizure was brought on when he was elevated to happiness and just starting to come down to neutral. Because of this seizure, they were able to figure out exactly where in the brain it originated. Later, an operation cured the boy of his seizures altogether.

So every time I am on the neurology floor I think about wearing a two-sided T-shirt. The front will say, “Visit with the clowns” and on the back would be a waving hand and the words “Seize You Later!”

Hospital Orientation

Raise your hands now: How many of you have never seen the clowns before?

Raise them again if this is your first time seeing the clowns.

Don’t I look like I know something about fun? Many thanks to photographer George A. Taylor, MD.

Interesting. About the same!

Each member of Big Apple Circus Clown Care a is a professional performer – not a volunteer – selected for skill and sensitivity during a grueling audition process. Our training prepares us to work in the hospital environment. We learn proper hygiene and hospital procedures. We’re screened, we’re vaccinated, and we undergo an annual safety review. Our artistic quality and hygiene procedures are evaluated on a regular basis by our own “Joint Commission” on clowning.

Eight of the most talented and dedicated of these clowns can be found in the Clown Care program at Children’s Hospital Boston (CHB). There, they work with the hospitalized children, their parents and the hospital staff to ease the stress of serious illness by reintroducing laughter and fun as natural parts of life.

Collectively, and without boring you with details, some of their outstanding credits include:

  • Ringling Brothers Clown College graduates and teachers
  • Nationally and Internationally recognized
  • Performances from the streets to the center ring. From comedy clubs to the Lincoln Center. Broadway to Cirque Du Soleil.

Ironically (or maybe not), three of them were hospitalized at CHB as small children.

Patch Adams drew attention to the positive effect of humor and healing. Unlike us, however, he is a doctor who plays a clown. We are professional clowns who play doctors (one of my colleagues calls himself “Dr. Gongolfin.”)

Making clown rounds

Since 1995, the Clown Care Unit has been making clown rounds at Children’s. That’s 325 inpatient beds a week, 3 intensive care units, 11 floors of clinics and everything in between. We get our rundowns from the charge nurse or childlife specialist on all the floors we enter. They let us know any special details that will affect how we do our jobs. Do we need to take special precautions with any of the patients? Is anyone vision impaired? Unable to hear?

Here are some of our DOs and DON’Ts:

DO have fun. Join in! A problem shared is a problem divided, and a joy shared is a joy multiplied.

DON’T ask us to be associated with a painful procedure. Wait till after.

DON’T assume that someone is too young or two old for clowns. We have age-appropriate material for newborns to adults.

Professionalism and sensitivity, combined with the commitment to our art, are the keys that unlock the many doors of the hospital and bring us into the hearts of the children, families and staff. In the short time that we’ve been at Children’s Hospital Boston, I have discovered how important  and what an honor “IT” is to be able to “Walk someone to the door.”

There are many doors of the hospital. Registration, Admitting, Pre-Op, the elevator, the exam rooms, the cafeteria, the garden, and the front door. Even the door from this life to the next.

All these doors taught me a trick that is sure to make anyone smile:  Miss the door and walk right into the wall!

Nursing Notes from Nurse B.B.

 

That's me, front and center with the other clowns at Children's Hospital Boston! Photo Courtesy George A. Taylor, M.D.

Heartstrings

The clown’s work not only brings laughter, it sometimes brings tears. Tears of joy and tears of sadness.

Tears and laughter are attached together to the same heartstring.

We have all laughed till we cried, and cried so much that we started laughing.

We sometimes laugh at a child’s tears, but other times their giggles and laughs make us cry.

_______________________________________________________________

Through my work at Children’s Hospital Boston, I was privileged to see firsthand the effect of humor on the healing process. The hospital, which was founded in 1869, is the pediatric teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School. Its first year, it had 69 patients. Take a look at some more current (the year 2000) mind-blowing statistics:

  • 17,599 Discharges
  • 3,447 Observation Days
  • 19,434 Inpatient Surgical Procedures
  • 10,815 Ambulatory Surgical Procedures
  • 258,740 Clinic Visits
  • 51,948 Emergency department visits (not including parents, grandparents, or guardians)
  • 900 nurses & patient service staff
  • 791 Attending medical and dental staff
  • 671 Residents and fellows
  • 988 Nurses
  • 2,317 Other full-time employees
  • 516 Other part time employees
  • 509    Volunteers
  • 365 inpatients beds
  • 11 floors of clinics
  • 8 Clowns!!!!!!

So if the clowns see only 1 shift of Medical/Dental/House/Nursing staff and Volunteers, plus the 19,000-odd kids going to surgery, not to mention a few thousand parents, nannies and people asking for directions, I’d say our quick census count is “Up There!”