Madhouse in the emergency room: it’s infernally hot,, many people, queues, several ambulances in a row one after another. Another one arrives: a 12-year-old boy on a buggy, snakebite. His mother is beside him, she looks tense and anxious.
We come up: me, Dr. Sadhat, and my colleague Dr. Banana:
“OK, calm down, we’re here! Professionals are playing ball! What’s going on?”
Mother is watching us. Our look, I must say, is utterly moronic, but charming. I’m in a red velvet camisole, a shirt with a puffy lace jabot and giant blue shoes. And Dr. Banana, a handsome man with the grace of a dancer is in a white doctor’s coat and broken glasses, with one lens taped over with a plaster.
The boy’s mother is wary:
“Can we have other doctors? We’re not in the mood for jokes. We need a check-up”.
“Don’t worry, mama, everything is already being taken care of! Everything is under control while we’re with you!”
EMTs chuckle softly, hand the kid over to us. And we get to work.
The boy lies on his back, all he can see is a fragment of the ceiling in the “anteroom” of the emergency room. The beauty of our position is that we can always comically walk into his field of vision: just now there was a ceiling in front of him, and then a clown’s head pops up.
“Snake bite! Wow! So, are you going to get some kind of superpower now? Snake Man? And they’ll make comic books and movies about you? Wait, wait, so maybe you already have superpowers? All right, Dr. Banana, let’s try it! Come on, guess what his name is!” — I’m pointing at Dr. Banana.
“Aristarchus? Sigizigmund? Athanasius?” — The boy rushes through amazing names, eventually guessing.
The boy’s mother already calmed down, left her son with us, and went to draw up the papers.
The boy’s all game, guessing the stage name.
“Come on, snake man, what does he look like?”
“Like a banana!”
The guy is taken away to the examining room, the mother bids us an appreciative farewell.
***
Half an hour later I pass by the doctor’s box.
“So, what, you thought you were hiding from us? Ah-ha-ha, nobody got away from us yet!”
And the boy laughs.
Because as soon as the mood changes from anxious to light and playful, you immediately forget what’s was going on and what you were worried about a few minutes ago.
***
For a clown, an emergency means working on one square meter with something very hot that has just happened. On the one hand, it’s hard: the intensity of the excitement is very high.
But on the other hand, this is also the advantage of the emergency room: if a person has met a clown and managed to live through the experience, then this experience is realized easier and it goes away faster.
It does not linger, it is easier to absorb, it does not leave heavy traces.
— — —
Healthcare clowning can help to take care of emotions of sick children — that is a special kind of support for children in hospital. Through games, humor and improvisation, Clowndoctors help young patients to cope with stress and recover more quickly. They can do it more often with your support.
