Moving Day at Children's Hospital

Tuesday was no ordinary day at Children's Hospital, one of the 13 Harvard teaching hospitals.

Beginning at 6 a.m., 70 volunteers and most of the hospital staff spent 12 hours moving 320 patients--ranging in age from newborn babies to young adults--to a larger building next door to the old one on Longwood Ave., in Boston.

During the exodus, which ended three hours ahead of schedule, groups of patients journeyed one at a time to their new homes. The new building, connected to the old one on the fifth and sixth floors, cost the hospital $86 million.

Staff members had developed detailed plans so the 320 sick children could be moved with the least possible disturbance, but some changes in the hospital's routine were inevitable.

Meals were served as usual, but they were boxed in the fashion of the popular McDonald's "Happy Meal." Staff members not directly assigned to patient care gathered in the halls connecting the two buildings to watch the children's faces as they caught the first glimpse of their new surroundings. They were not disappointed. The patients were visibly excited about the large, windowed patient rooms and playrooms, and the beds that raise and lower automatically.

The corridors in the new building sported balloons and streamers, and each unit welcomed patients with signs and special touches, including colorful murals in the playrooms. Hospital personnel wore brightly colored t-shirts with the message, "We moved the Children's Hospital...February, 1988."

The new building also features fold-out beds in patient rooms which allow parents to spend the night right next to their children. "One of [the hospital's] principle commitments is family treatment. It is part of the healing process to have Mom or Dad nearby," said David Peck, project manager for the new building.

The atmosphere may have seemed more like a carnival than a hospital, but health care was still the priority. Oxygen tanks and emergency equipment stood ready in the corners. Department heads and staff members carried walkie-talkies to ensure communication between the two buildings.

And although some children seemed to be just enjoying the ride, the oxygen masks and wheelchairs served as constant reminders that Children's is a hospital.

The Welcome Wagon

Each patient was attended by at least one nurse and usually several volunteers and relatives during the move. And three staff members waited in the connecting halls to welcome patients with a small stuffed animal. For some infants, the move meant leaving behind the only home they had ever known.

Purple monkey in hand and grinning broadly, Arthur Hacking, a member of the hospital's facility planning team, stood waiting for the next traveller. Hacking said the move gave him renewed faith in what he called "the mystique of Children's Hospital."

"This place is something special," he said. "No matter what you do at the hospital, everyone is contributing to getting children well."

Anne Lang, vice president of the human resources department and interim vice president of operations, took her job on the welcoming team very seriously. When a teenaged patient passed by her station, she asked with concern if he wanted a stuffed animal. "We don't want you to feel left out," she said.

While some children completed the move on foot, perhaps pushing a medicine bag hanging from a pole or nursing an arm in a cast, others moved in wheelchairs or special sterile tents.

The premature babies lay inside incubators and did not stop to collect a stuffed animal. But most other patients did. One small girl in a wheelchair peeked out over her oxygen mask, pointed her finger and said clearly, "the purple one."

Chrisha Froio

Three-year old Chrisha Froio, from Rehoboth, Massachusetts, had a particularly difficult move. Chrisha, who received a bone marrow transplant from her father almost four weeks ago, left her sterile room for the first time since the surgery.

Undaunted by the confusion and apparently excited by the move, Chrisha sat up in her sterile plastic tent as she was carefully wheeled in and out of hallways and elevators to her new room. The new room has a larger anteroom than the old one, which allows relatives to move around more easily, said Chrisha's mother, Christine Froio.

Chrisha's grandmother Bea Cudmore followed the procession to the new building's sixth floor, snapping pictures for a scrapbook she said she was making for Chrisha. She referred to the room Chrisha was leaving as the "miracle room," saying that for the children who stay there, the room is their "last chance."

Calling the doctors and nurses at the hospital "terrific," Cudmore said, "If I had a million dollars, I would give it to Children's Hospital for what they have done for that baby."

Chrisha entered Children's on August 18. Since then she has been home only three times, for a total of two weeks. Chrisha has limited contact with the outside world, and everything she touches must be sterilized. Nonetheless, Christine Froio said her daughter is full of questions, and "she loves to watch Sesame Street. She loves all the nurses and knows all their names."

Transplant patients are allowed virtually no skin contact with their relatives, and Chrisha's mother and grandmother said they can only touch her with their scrubbed hands. Christine Froio said that not being able to kiss Chrisha is "the worst feeling in the world." As a partial solution, Cudmore said she puts a facecloth on Chrisha's head in order to kiss her.

As she watched the tented crib carrying her grandaughter move slowly down the hall, Cudmore said, "This is when I can cry."

Laura McLaughlin

Another patient who moved on Tuesday had only been in the hospital for a day when the journey took place. But in the morning before her unit moved, thirteen-year old Laura McLaughlin, from Manchester, N.H., had an operation to remove a tube from her chest.

Laura, who was diagnosed as having leukemia in 1983, had been in remission for several years. But she relapsed in January and had to re-enter the hospital. "I didn't think [the cancer] would come back," she said.

An "old-timer" in the old building, Laura said she recognized some of the nurses. She added that she was waiting for Pam, her favorite nurse, to come on duty, so she could give her a friendship bracelet she had made.

Laura is currently at Children's to receive a high dosage of medication. She will return to Boston every three weeks for additional treatments, which last three days on the average, Laura said. Laura said her mother and father take turns staying overnight in the hospital. The other parent sleeps at a nearby Ronald McDonald House for families of children with cancer.

While she is in the hospital, Laura said she watches television and movies on the VCR and plays video games. "I love the duck hunting game. You know the one where you have a gun and you shoot the ducks on the screen," she said. "If you miss, they come up and laugh at you."

Laura has a doll on which she practices all the medical procedures which she must undergo. She has had a lot of practice explaining her condition. When she described how her disease had come back, this time in the form of an earache, she sounded far more knowledgeable than most adults.

Laura said she will eventually have a tutor, but for now she is homework-free. Even so, she said she misses school. "When I'm in school sometimes I wish I was sick so I wouldn't have to be there. But when I'm in the hospital getting poked, I wish I was at school with all my friends," she said.

Katie O'Kiefe

Although many of the patients who completed Tuesday's move face long-term illnesses and surgery, some of them receive positive news instead. Laura's roommate, Katie O'Kiefe, a 12-year old from Everett, Massachusetts, said she will go home today, reassured by doctors and tests that her leukemia has not come back and she is still in remission.

Katie was first diagnosed as having leukemia seven years ago and has been in remission since then. Last Wednesday when she suffered seizures, she was rushed to the new emergency room at Children's. But her seizures were diagnosed as a neurological disorder that is unrelated to cancer.

The move completed, the empty buildings of the "old" Children's Hospital will now house offices, clinical labs, the hemo-therapy unit and an expanded physical therapy department.

The hospital will use two floors of the old building as "quasi-dormitory space" for parents of Intensive Care patients who are too sick to have their parents sleep in their rooms, Peck said.

Tuesday was both "exhilarating and poignant for the Children's family," Peck said. "It was both a beginning and an end for the people who have been at Children's for a long time. They will never take care of another patient in these buildings, where there have been patients for up to 50 years."