On a typical work day, Michele Erich wanders New Hanover Regional Medical Center’s halls in Wilmington, N.C., a guitar or pinwheel as her medicine bag.

Erich, the hospital’s music therapist and child life specialist, splits her days between the cancer center, the ICU and the pediatric floors.

She might use a kaleidoscope to distract a child getting an IV line put in. Later, she could be playing soft music by a bed to comfort a dying patient and their family. Other days, she strums the guitar to relax cancer patients getting chemotherapy treatments.

“It’s nice to be able to offer them something that’s pleasant and not another piece of bad news or something that hurts,” Erich says one recent afternoon at the Betty H. Cameron Women’s and Children’s Hospital.

Erich has been a music therapist for more than 20 years – the past 12 at New Hanover Regional. She became certified as a child life specialist in 2004.

Child life specialists, with a background in child development, use a range of tactics from play to self-expression activities to education to ease some of the stress associated not only with being sick but adapting to the changes involved in spending time in a hospital room instead of home.

Sometimes that can be as simple as taking extra time to talk a pediatric patient through what’s about to happen to her or him.

“I give them the facts. I explain it to them in their language,” Erich says.

Other times, the child Erich helps isn’t a patient but a family member at the hospital. Child life specialists also work with families facing the death of a loved one.

“Taking a 6-year-old in to say goodbye to his mother is not the easiest thing to do,” she says.

Erich often combines her music and child life specialties, using instruments to get pediatric patients to open up or to distract them from the fact that they are in a hospital.

On a recent afternoon, 9-year-old Alan Westbrook sat in the hospital’s pediatric floor playroom, beating furiously on a tom-tom drum.

“Let’s see if you and I can come up with a good rhythm,” says Erich, holding a kid-sized djembe drum.

Beating on the instruments and scurrying from one piece to another, Alan looked like any normal kid.

Only the IV catheter taped to his hand gave away the fact that he was a patient and not in his school’s music class. Alan had to spend a couple of days at the hospital after an asthma attack.

“It’s got to be a plus,” his father, Gene, says about the child life program. “You know kids when they come here, they’re scared.”

“Being in the hospital’s not very enjoyable,” says Emily Martin, whose 4-year-old daughter Jordan was being treated overnight for dehydration. “This is really good. It seems like a great idea to keep the kids occupied.”

For Erich, moving around the hospital is part of her position’s draw because she enjoys working with patients of different ages.

“The work I do is very rewarding,” she says. “I think I learn something new every day.”

Source: Vicky Eckenrode/Star News, Wilmington, N.C.