De Nada

The clown beside me is Dr. Doo Hickey. He is a clown of many talents, but his Superpower is connecting with children under the age of 4. IMHO Nobody does it better and I have seen quite a few clowns in my 21 years of healthcare clowning.

Today one of our most challenging rooms was a 3 year old girl under contact/droplet precautions who spoke Spanish. We performed from the doorway. I was wearing a mask all day which meant I could not blow bubbles, and Doo Hickey started a song on his mandolin. It had little effect, so he went to the green and yellow birds that live in his pocket, which usually never fails, but again the only reaction was a confused stare. Then he pulls out his baseball card, (each clown has their own card now), tells her to call us if she sees the green bird. As he is saying this, he holds the card up to his ear miming a telephone call, then tosses the card on the bed.

On our way to the next room, I tried to encourage my partner not to let that worry him. No matter how hard we try, we can’t reach them all. As soon as I finished my little pep talk, a therapist walks up and says, “That little girl’s Mom said she is ready to talk now.”

We looked at each other with excitement, rushed back to her room and discovered she had tried to call us using the baseball card and wondered why it had not worked. Her Mom told us that she had a toy medical kit and wanted to examine us and give us our flu shot!

We then threw on the gowns, gloves, and masks, hastily entered the room, and for the next ten minutes all you could hear were squeals of laughter coming from this precious child. It became a delightful dance of slapstick and silliness as we kept reacting to the reflex hammer, the hypodermic, the stethoscope, etc. and bumping into each other and the wall. The mother’s look of gratitude on her face is why we continue to do this Work! She could not thank us enough for coming back and we were very happy to say De Nada!