A Place Where Paws Help Ease the Pain

Rx: Dog visits daily, between meals.

That’s part of the therapy at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, where a canine corps including Mac the sheltie, Obie the poodle and Baby, a mixed breed, makes daily bedside visits, extending a friendly paw or cuddling up with a patient for a little snooze.

“When the dogs come, I forget about pain and stuff,” says Michelle Hicks, 23, who is periodically in the hospital for sickle cell anemia treatment. “I always say, ‘If I’m asleep, wake me, because I love to see them.’ ”

As she talks, Hicks is sharing her bed with the odd couple of the Pet Assisted Therapy (PAT) program: Tess, a 100-pound golden retriever, and Taylor, a 15-pound black dog of dubious lineage. At the moment, they’re jockeying for position, Tess having thrown a little body block.

The PAT teams--two volunteers in pink tunics, two dogs with pink scarves--are a familiar sight at Huntington, where they visit all but the neonatal and maternity units. Maternity patients “have their own warm, soft, cuddly things to hold,” one volunteer explains.

In the extended-care facility, Petie the Jack Russell and Tigger, a black collie / Lab, are making the rounds with owners Cindy Niemetz and Cecily Seabourn. A team for four years, the women feign an intense my-dog’s-better-than-your-dog rivalry.

“Petie at times gets a little bit of attitude,” Niemetz acknowledges of her dog. He’s having what she calls “a terrier moment,” having sniffed out some Cornnuts on a bedside table. “Lonely Jack Russell, will work for food,” teases Seabourn, mentioning that Tigger’s behaving impeccably.

“We’re like Lucy and Ethel,” says Niemetz--Lucy and Ethel with Polaroid cameras. One woman they visit tells them, “My son comes to see me and I say there’s dogs in this hospital and he says, ‘Now, now Mother. . . .’ ” She insists on a photo.

The sight of the dogs triggers memories among elderly patients. Soon, an old man is stroking Tigger and telling Seabourn about hunting possum with his hound back in South Carolina.

Dogs mean home, and “for a lot of these people, this is home,” Niemetz says. “It’s the last place they’re going to be.” That’s the downside for both volunteers and dogs in the convalescent facility. Tigger still goes to one room looking for the woman who used to give him graham crackers.

The PAT dogs are so well-behaved, boasts Holli Pfau, a recreation therapist and the PAT program coordinator, that “People think there’s some sort of a lending library where you go and check out this beautiful, well-mannered dog.”

Dogs and owners go through a rigorous selection process that one volunteer described as “like applying to Harvard.” The dogs must be at least a year old, healthy and housebroken, and proficient in basic obedience skills--sit, heel, stay. Only half the applicants make the cut and advance to the eight-to-10-week training program.

Some volunteers joke that Pfau--whose golden retriever, Nikki, was one of PAT’s founding dogs--is a “breedist” because Labs and golden retrievers predominate. She insists it’s just that these breeds are “people dogs, born to do this.”

There are no pit bulls, Dobermans or other breeds that get a bad rap. Pfau says diplomatically that, while many are wonderful dogs, “If you saw a nice pit bull coming around the corner, it might not be too comforting.”

As for the owners, who must be adults, are they too gushy? Too intrusive? Sensitive enough? Pfau says she never wants “a volunteer who can’t cry” when it’s appropriate.

In training, dogs are introduced to dog-greet-dog etiquette and hospital sights, smells and sounds. Pfau and volunteers Dr. Peter Lippincott, a vet, and Bill Stavers, an animal behavior specialist, assess dog-owner rapport. They’re looking for dogs that are companions, Pfau says, not “something that is owned and used and yanked into submission.”

Basic dog rules: no barking, no eating (a hard one to enforce), no scratching or licking. Dogs must be freshly bathed and groomed when reporting on leash for their weekly two-hour shifts, teeth scrubbed. Enthusiasm is encouraged, exuberance controlled. “Our worst nightmare is a puppy on the surgical ward making a leap onto somebody’s middle,” Pfau says.

Volunteers are reminded, “You can’t fix anything--and you shouldn’t try.” They’re there to bring happiness, good cheer and a willing ear.

Although studies show such physical benefits of pet therapy as lowered blood pressure, Dr. Sandra Wallace, who chairs Huntington’s infection control committee and is a PAT advisor, stresses the psychological and emotional impact on patients. “It gives them a pleasurable focus . . . particularly when we have to do unpleasant things to them. Some of our patients actually get very upset if they don’t have their regular dog visits.”

Although no dog has ever spread infection, she says, some doctors remain skeptical. “Physicians tend to overlook things that are not standard therapy.” About 40% of the doctors at Huntington either allow or routinely order dog visits.

Wallace says she’s heard only one complaint: One person was afraid it was too stressful for the dogs. But volunteers say the dogs lap it up. Glenda Rosen says of Rosie, her Lab / golden retriever mix: “When I put the scarf on her, she gets all excited and jumps in the car. When I pull into the driveway of the hospital, she goes bonkers. I swear, she could go by herself. She doesn’t really need me.”

You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby

In the Middle Ages, it seems, an Englishwoman in agonizing labor was reminded that pain was the price women paid for Eve’s transgression. To which, it was duly recorded, the woman retorted, “I wish the apple had choked her.”

The story was told by David Cressy, Cambridge-educated professor of history at Cal State Long Beach, at a “Childbirth in Early Modern Europe” symposium sponsored by UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

In 16th and 17th century England, Cressy noted, childbirth “was associated with piety and endurance . . . shame and chastisement.” It was a spiritual-social event and “only tangentially and accidentally did it have anything to do with medicine.”

Godliness, not gynecology, was what it was about. Christians, believing that everyone was conceived and born in sin and thus deserved God’s wrath, viewed any attempt to alleviate the mother’s suffering as a mockery of God.

Typically, the woman was surrounded in the birthing room by a supporting chorus of neighbor women and attended by a midwife whose only qualification might be that she was morally upright. Her tools: knife, sponge, herbal oils and binders. “No one knew about washing hands,” Cressy said.

The patient’s husband, banned from the room, kept the women supplied with food and drink. Should birth complications arise, it was unlikely a doctor could be found, so the midwife just prayed harder--often in vain.

“If she botched the job,” Cressy said, “it was an act of God.” But she could be censured for a social gaffe. One, for example, was chastised for letting a cross-dressed man into a birthing room.

And pity the poor unwed mother. It was the midwife’s job to pry from the mother the identity of the father, by making her suffer, if necessary, and to “ensure that the sinners were punished.” Some women opted for abortion or infanticide rather than shame.

* This weekly column chronicles the people and small moments that define life in Southern California. Reader suggestions are welcome.