A Personable Trio of Pet Therapists

An hour after the sun climbs over the Pacific Palisades and paves the ocean with gold, Holli Pfau and her big Labrador retriever, Nikki, start for work clear across town in Pasadena. Holly and Nikki are members of the pet therapy team at Huntington Memorial Hospital.

And at the top of Santa Clarita Valley, deep in Canyon Country, Jenny Hamilton and Saffron start the same journey from another side of the county. Jenny says: “I’m the colonial. I’m from New Zealand.”

The third member of the team and her partner, Monty, which is short for Field Marshal Montgomery, start 45 minutes later because they live in Pasadena. She is Maggie De Witt, from England, who gave the pet therapy program its first push. Maggie was a volunteer in the rehabilitation section of Huntington Memorial when she saw the warm well-being that Maureen Beith was bringing to her patients with a dog from the pound she named Chelsea.

“None of us would be here if it weren’t for Mo,” all three pet therapists said.

The dogs visit patients in the hospital on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the women attend meetings, conferences and discussion groups on most of the other days. The dogs are screened, tested and trained until they have the poise of a prince of the blood royal.

Dr. Peter Lippincott, a veterinarian in Pasadena, devised the tests, which include someone clattering out of a door suddenly with noisy metal objects. If the dog starts, then goes and examines the objects and thinks, “Oh, sure, it’s just a cart,” and settles back down, he’s passed the test. Lippincott bought the blandishments of the three dog handlers and is now a proud program volunteer.

Patients plead for visits from the beautiful animals with the regal heads and the dispositions of the dogs who tagged after your childhood sneakers.

They are going through a recording period now, to amass the information required before they can work in other areas of the hospital. Dr. Gilbert P. Kipnis, friend, neighbor and one of the gilt-edged dividends of my move to Pasadena, explained that these statistics must be gathered for the Institutional Review Board and are a federal requirement for any research project that involves human beings. Kipnis is vice president of health care services and director of medical education for Huntington Memorial.

The pet therapy sixsome became full-fledged members of the hospital’s volunteer brigade when they were given the enthusiastic blessing of Nancy Schmitt and Priscilla Gamb, co-directors of the overall volunteer program.

Jenny Hamilton, who works with the enchanting Saffron, known to her intimates as Saffy, designed and made to measure the dogs’ pink kerchiefs of the same fabric as the human volunteers’ pinafores. The dogs wear regular employee tags bearing their names and pictures. As soon as they see the kerchiefs come out, the dogs jump and frisk and run for the front door, the women say. “They know they’re going to work and to see their friends and they love it,” one explained.

Each team member had stories to tell that made me swallow hard. Holli and the beautiful Nikki work in the oncology unit. Two of the patients were in and out of the hospital a lot and “Nikki and her patients built a lovely rapport. If the patient invites a dog on the bed, we help them up. First, the dog puts his forepaws on the edge of the bed and then we lift the hindquarters so the bed won’t jolt.

“One day, Nikki was visiting her friend and they both went sound asleep, Nikki in her arms with her head on the patient’s shoulder. They slept an hour. After that, every time Nikki got on the bed, the two of them curled up and went off to sleep. It was a warm, intimate, trusting friendship.”

Nikki drew the highest praise from another woman who had been jabbed and prodded and poked during her long treatment. Nikki stayed on the bed because the patient pleaded for her to and when a procedure was over, she said, “That was the easiest i.v. I ever had. It was because Nikki was with me.”

One of the magnificent Monty’s triumphs was an elderly gentleman, desperately frail. When he first met the dog, he stroked his head and said his name over and over. He had been in the hospital for two months.

Next visit, he saw all the dogs, petted them all and told the women about a beloved Great Dane he had once had. After a few more visits, he was able to be moved to a convalescent home. The man’s doctors said that it was Monty’s case, his victory.

As the dogs get to their stations, their demeanors change. They are gentle and composed and tender with their patients. Jenny and Saffy work on a medical unit and Saffy carefully places her soft muzzle in the lap of one of her friends in a wheelchair. Later she walks down the corridor with another who is making a scary first trip, steady and evenly paced.

Monty made a recent conquest of an orthopedic patient named Helen Nielsen, who is an employee in the Huntington Out-Patient Dispensary. As the regal dog stretched out beside the small woman and put his head on her shoulder, she said, “This is such a wonderful idea. You lie here all alone, watching the rain and your back hurts and all of sudden this beautiful dog walks in the room to see you.”

“What we didn’t expect is that the entire hospital staff gets a big lift out of having the dogs on the floor,” Kipnis said.

“And for the patients, it’s the closest thing to home they have in a foreign atmosphere. The dog just brings love. He doesn’t want anything. He’s the only person that comes into the room who doesn’t ask for anything, to draw blood, to insert a needle, to ask a probing question.”

I don’t think Dr. Kipnis knew he had said person.

As I left the hospital, I saw the three dogs and their co-workers walking down the corridor in front of me, the dogs waving their amiable rear ends and flagging their tails. And as they passed, a young man in a lab coat walked by and brushed his fingers across Saffy’s head without looking down, with the familiarity of total acceptance.