No limit to his patients

It’s easy to mistake volunteer Richard Morrison for one of the staff at Children’s Hospital of Orange County.

He’s the one with a pager on his belt, clipboard in hand, hurrying in and out of hospital rooms to chat with weary-eyed parents and children battling cancer, cystic fibrosis and other debilitating diseases.

Officially, the 69-year-old Lake Forest man is a greeter of patients and their families at the hospital in Orange. Unofficially, the spry, white-haired fellow in the hot pink hospital smock and tennis shoes with Mickey Mouse shoelaces does all kinds of odd jobs, large and small.

“I do whatever they call me to do on this thing,” Morrison said, pointing to his beeper.

Of CHOC’s 275 volunteers, Morrison’s one of two who carries a pager. (The other assists nurses.) He wears the beeper so he can ferry urgently needed medical supplies or records from one ward to another. Sometimes he’ll rush to the kitchen to get food for a hungry child. He spends most of his four shifts a week cheering up patients and their families.

“When my beeper isn’t going off, I visit every bed. I just try to be a comforting presence,” he said.

The parents he comforts don’t realize that Morrison has much in common with them: He knows what it’s like to lose a child.

His son Larry died of complications of AIDS in 1994 at age 31. “I do it for him,” he said.

Those he greets seldom see Morrison’s private side. Parents only know him by his friendly banter, by the way he touches them on their shoulder and, in a gentle voice, asks if there’s anything, anything at all, he can do. They know him as someone who will keep their children entertained while they escape for a much-needed break from their bedside vigil.

“He’s all over this hospital,” said Paula Smith, director of volunteers for CHOC. “He bounces around. He’ll go to the [neonatal intensive-care] unit to hold a baby or get coffee for the parents or sit with a child in the oncology unit.”

A retired engineer, Morrison volunteered at CHOC two years ago. He spent hours disinfecting toys, mats and hospital supplies, a chore he hated. He complained to Smith that he didn’t want to sit around.

“They didn’t know what to do with me,” he said. “I wanted to work hands-on with the kids.”

He’s much happier since they made him the hospital greeter, a role that puts him constantly in touch with patients. He usually works about noon to 5 p.m. but often stays hours later.

“He’s the greatest guy,” said Martha Aleme-Selassie, a diet technician at Children’s Hospital. “He helps so much and works so hard. He does his job like he’s paid time and a half. He has a big heart.”

Morrison works at CHOC on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. On Thursday, his “day off,” he helps give physical therapy to a brain-damaged child at a private residence in Aliso Viejo.

He volunteers, he said, because he figures he has “so much discretionary time.” It keeps him from sitting around the house and, as he put it, “griping about my boredom.” He’s divorced and has two daughters, one in Hawaii and the other in Utah, and seven grandchildren.

On a recent afternoon, Morrison made the rounds at his customary nonstop pace, hurrying from room to room, ward to ward, impatiently tapping his feet when delayed by a slow elevator. One regular duty is to pick up the daily menus from patients. That’s how he has come to know many of the kids.

“A lot of them have chronic, life-threatening conditions. They’re here with cancer or cystic fibrosis, so they’re in and out all the time. You get to be a family. You fall in love with them.”

In the medical-surgery unit on the fifth floor, where patients are on extended stay due to surgical problems or medical conditions such as pneumonia, appendicitis or cystic fibrosis, Morrison stepped into a room.

“Hi, Mama, how are you doing?” he whispers to a mother whose 6-year-old boy lies curled up in bed. He pats her on the shoulder as she hands him the menu.

Later, he finds a teen-age girl with blue polish on her fingernails sitting on her bed, working on a painting.

“Let me see what you’re doing,” said Morrison. It’s an album with the words “Angels Soar” in fancy letters.

Morrison tries not to intrude on people’s privacy. He seems to know when they want company or prefer to be alone.

“They’re needy in different ways,” he said. “Some may want you to joke and have fun; some may want someone to cry and complain to. Parents may want coffee or soda, or they may just want you to get out of their face. You have to be sensitive when treading on people’s troubles.”

Elsewhere in the hospital, he greeted an 18-year-old boy awaiting a bone-marrow transplant.

“Hey, how’re you doing?”

“Just fine,” the boy said, his tone flat.

“Do you feel like doing a menu?” Morrison asked.

“No, not really,” the boy replied.

Morrison steps into the room.

“You feeling OK?”

“Yeah,” said the patient, then smiles weakly. “Thank you.”

On the fourth floor, where patients undergo short-term procedures such as chemotherapy treatments, he pops into a room where a 6-year-old lies surrounded by his mother and siblings.

“Leave me alone,” said the patient, who’d had enough of people with clipboards. Morrison left immediately.

“Kids will say exactly what they mean,” he explained.

Most welcome Morrison because he’s always in jovial spirits. On one recent day, he was cracking jokes and singing a Bing Crosby song.

“It’s a little entertainment, take it or leave it,” he said.

To amuse one teen-age boy, he preened like a bodybuilder flexing muscles. When he passed a room where visitors are forbidden and saw a boy looking through the glass, he gave a military-style salute.

“You don’t like it here?” he asked a 4-year-old watching TV with his father. “Has anyone given you a tickle test?” The boy was still giggling when Morrison left.

Michelle Houston has come to know Morrison as she has sat at the bedside of her 4-year-old son, Drew, who has cancer.

“He comes in all the time. He’s always upbeat, always making jokes,” Houston said.

How does Morrison keep his spirits up?

“Sometimes I don’t,” he said. “I cry a lot.”

He goes to every funeral he can, nine in the past 12 months.

“When I lose one of my kids, I’ve got to go be with the parents,” he said. “We had one kid who died of asthma. It was my first death. I was on the second floor, bawling my eyes out.”

He clipped the child’s funeral notice out of the newspaper and kept it in his smock pocket for a year. For the past few weeks, he’s carried a funeral card from a 15-year-old girl who died of cystic fibrosis.

“A week before she died, she was playing Nerf ball with me in the hallway,” he recalled.

Later, in the pediatric intensive-care unit, Morrison put his hand on the shoulder of a woman rocking her baby. He asked her a few questions in what he calls his “survival Spanish,” then went to get her a glass of orange juice.

“She’s here all day, completely alone,” he said, shaking his head and fighting back tears. “I try to fill that vacuum.”

* Do you know someone who gives a gift of their time to help others? Please write and tell us about otherwise unheralded folks who make a difference. Send your tips--and please include both your name and telephone number and theirs--by facsimile to (714) 966-7790 or by mail to the Gift of Time, Life & Style, Times Orange County, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.