Midshipmen Make Kids’ Hospital Stay Smooth Sailing

“I don’t share,” declares Midshipman 1st Class Jon McDivitt, but he is smiling as he cradles the infant closer.

His body rocks continuously, unconsciously, as he cuddles 3-month-old Kobe in the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.

It is 9:30 on a Saturday morning and, as one of the privileged seniors at the U.S. Naval Academy, McDivitt could be sleeping in. Instead, he is in a room with three crying infants. Each suffers from a different terrible ailment, but all are in need of the same thing: human contact. Sometimes McDivitt has one in each arm.

“All they need is a nice warm body,” says the Albuquerque, N.M., native. “Sometimes I get to feed them a bottle. But most of the time I just hold them the whole time I’m here.”

He is one of about 24 midshipmen who spend Saturday mornings with young patients here--cuddling or coloring, playing Nintendo or pool, reading stories or playing board games. Only Fuzzy, the long-eared rabbit who lives in the fourth-floor playroom, is more popular.

“The presence they bring to the floor is a big plus,” says child life specialist Marcy Humes, who has trained most of the midshipmen. “First, they are available on weekends, when most volunteers are not. And second, so many of them are male, and, face it, these kids are surrounded by women all the time.”

The midshipman who coordinates Project White Hat just happens to be a woman. At 7:30 on this morning, Navy junior Erin McKenzie parked a rented van just outside the gates of the academy and mustered her troops for the ride to Baltimore. Over the rumble of the van engine, she explained why midshipmen, whose student life is enormously demanding, would give up a Saturday morning.

“We live in a bubble at the Naval Academy,” says the Pittsburgh native.

“You could call it a cage,” McDivitt pipes in from the seat behind her.

“Whatever,” she fires back. “But this gets you out into the real world. And you see how tough other kids have it.”

Midshipman Joseph Vo, the driver, parks the van beside the hospital, and the volunteers, in full uniform, head for the cafeteria. “The kids like the uniforms,” says McKenzie with a self-conscious shrug. It is early, and most of the children will still be asleep. There is time for a quick breakfast and some conversation.

“I’ve been volunteering in hospitals since I was 14,” says McKenzie, “and I’ve spent plenty of time in hospitals myself. It seems like I was always getting injured. I was sort of a tomboy.” Her father graduated from the Naval Academy, and her younger brother will be there next year.

“Anyway, it seems to me that there was always someone smiling at me, so that’s what I try to do. To take their minds off the fact that they are in a hospital.”

McKenzie sends her troops off to their floors and then reports to the medical-surgical unit for school-age kids. There she checks in with Humes, the child life specialist, to see where she is needed most.

Her first assignment is to take Fuzzy, the rabbit, to visit 4-year-old A.J. Giudicy of St. Louis, who is confined to bed.

A.J. has had 17 surgeries to correct a congenital defect. During this, the family’s first visit to Hopkins, surgeons successfully constructed a pelvis from bone grafts, returned A.J.’s bladder to the inside of his body and closed his abdomen for the first time in his short life.

A.J.’s grandmother, Nan Everett, a nursing supervisor, marvels at the presence of the midshipmen.

“We have never had anything like this before,” she says.

From the daybed where she sleeps, Everett watches her grandchild playing Mario Cart, a video game, with McKenzie. For a moment she seems to relax her vigilance. “I feel like I can actually leave the room for 10 minutes and walk around,” she says.

Like McKenzie and McDivitt, Midshipman Darshan Thota plans to go into medicine, so it would seem that this Saturday morning is a reconnaissance mission, of a sort, for him.

Not exactly.

“I really miss my family, my godchildren, my little cousins,” says the sophomore from St. Simons Island, Ga., a grateful newcomer to McKenzie’s group of volunteers. “I got to take care of a 20-month-old for a whole weekend. She would fall asleep on me and drool. Baby drool. You can’t get more real than that.

“If I didn’t come here on weekends, I’d go crazy.”

Thota has buckets of drool to deal with this morning. He is playing tug-of-war with 3-year-old Bennie, using a length of plastic tubing. Bennie holds on to his end with his teeth, and he must be cutting some new ones because drool is flowing from him as if he were a downspout.

“You just do whatever makes them smile--and whatever doesn’t make the nurses mad,” Thota says. He likes to work in the Pediatric Clinical Research Unit, a small ward that deals with the rarest of children’s illnesses.

“Last time I spent the whole visit talking to a 24-year-old guy who has cystic fibrosis. He was in here as part of a study. He said he’d lost a lot of people to CF, and he wanted to help so no more would die.”

Little Bennie is fed through a tube and is heavily monitored. It makes sense that a prospective medical student working in a unit that handles rare diseases would be full of questions about the children he is entertaining.

“Curious? Yep. Ask questions? Nope. It isn’t my place to know. It is my place to keep them happy.”

It is fitting that Desiree Gonzalez, the only midshipman in this group who does not want to be a doctor (“I want to fly”), would draw this morning’s toughest duty: the children’s cancer ward.

The junior from Tucson defies all military stereotypes. Her voice is soft and breathy, her touch is light, her smile is quick but almost shy. She sits alone for a long while in the playroom, waiting for the terribly sick children in this ward to find the energy to venture in and play.

“I like the kids, but I like the parents, too,” she says. “They hardly ever leave when we are here because when their kids are up and playing with us, they like to watch them doing something so normal. And they really like to talk to us about their kids. About how proud they are of them.”

Susan Reimer writes for the Baltimore Sun, a Tribune company.