It was a very busy day at the children’s hospital this week! My human knew that the exam rooms would be full and she didn’t want me spending too much time in the lobby. But it was hard not to with so many kids there. The first one I went up to was a girl in a wheelchair with a couple of partially missing limbs — the result of a birth defect. But other than that, she was just a regular young girl who enjoyed petting me. I also visited with some other kids and parents before heading into the exam rooms.
The first couple of rooms we visited were the ones where kids get casts, or have their casts checked or removed. One boy was waiting for his cast, and his mother made sure he only petted me with his uninjured arm.
Most of the kids were really nice, but a couple of the younger kids were a little wild! One was a toddler that had one deformed leg and couldn’t walk. But that didn’t stop him from zooming around the room like a tornado. He was fascinated by me, and kept tapping my human’s leg as she sat with the two of us. Although he wasn’t rough with me, his excitement made it difficult for him to be gentle. He was enjoying me so much that when my human gathered me up to take me to the next room, he started crying.
The next room had a mom and two girls who were maybe preschool age or a year older. One girl had injured herself during a visit to the zoo. And she and her sister both went crazy over me! They were actually kind of invasive and all over me. But they weren’t being mean, and both their mom and my human made sure they didn’t do anything even remotely harmful. Still, I was really relieved when that visit was over!
The last couple of visits were really nice after the couple of crazy ones. The very next one after the two girls was an older teen who really wanted a cat. So she was really happy I was there, and spent a lot of time just petting me. The last family had a little girl who was maybe a couple of years older than the two wild girls. But she was just the opposite, calm and sweet. I liked her lots.
By then our visiting time was up. It had been a lot for me, so my human bundled me up, even though we probably could have stayed for another half hour!
If you are wondering how much the stressful visits affect me, once we got home, I was already out of therapy cat mode and back to my usual self, begging for treats, and happily enjoying the rest of my day.
