Angel on a Leash (6 page)

Just Whistle if You Need Me

W
hen I first moved to New York, my friend Karen LeFrak suggested that I bring my dogs to join her and her Standard Poodles, Jewel and Diamond, in visiting at Mount Sinai Medical Center, and we jumped right in. When I first started there, we could only visit patients in the recreational therapy room; no in-room visits were allowed. The physical therapists would bring the patients to us, and that could create some special moments.

One night, Teigh and I had just completed a quiet visit with a patient. I looked across the room and saw two boys, maybe in their late teens, sitting in high-backed wheelchairs. In front of them were a man and a woman, each of them feeding one of the boys. I guessed that the boys were brothers and that the man and woman were their parents. They seemed a little grim, so I also surmised that the boys were quadriplegic. I had no way of knowing, but perhaps the best guess was that they had been in some kind of an auto accident.

Teigh looked over at them and apparently caught the eye of one of the boys. The boy whistled. Teigh's ears went up, and he stood and started to wag his tail. The mother looked at me and smiled. I asked, “Can we come over and visit?” Mom looked to Dad, and I surmised a little more—that they and may not speak English. She said something to him in Spanish, and he looked at us and waved us over.

We walked across the room, and I said to the group, “Hi, my name is David, and this is Teigh, my therapy dog.” I got a smiling, wordless response. OK, so they don't speak English. Try again. “Hola, soy David y este es mi perro, Teigh.” Smiles from all.
Please no more Spanish,
I thought.
That's all I got.

The father pointed: “Miguel … Juanito.” I pointed to him and his wife: “Padre y madre?” “Si.”

The boys were smiling but not too active, as one might imagine. Teigh went to the whistler—Miguel—first, and sat down in front of him, looking up at him. Miguel whistled again, and it became very evident to me that he couldn't move his arms. Teigh tilted his head from side to side and stood up. One more whistle. Teigh lay down and rolled over. Laughter all around.

I was thrilled with this, and he had done it without any prompting from me.
Good boy, Teigh.
He stood there, wagging his little stub of a tail, soaking up the excitement. He found a scrap of food on the floor, probably something that had fallen off the tray. I'm not really supposed to encourage him to do that, but I saw that it was a piece of bread, so I pretended not to notice that he had found some contraband.

Next, I directed Teigh over in front of the other boy.
Juanito was still smiling, but apparently he couldn't whistle like his brother. That was OK, because what he could do was move his right arm. He slid his arm over to the side and dropped it off the tray so that his hand landed palm open and facing Teigh.

Teigh, God love him, ran right over there and high-fived him, slapping his paw into Juanito's open palm. Madre was crying; Padre was fighting back the tears; the boys were laughing it up. I knew that they hadn't had a moment like this for a while. Teigh found another scrap of food on the floor and seemed to know that it was put there for him.

Madre and Padre reached down and petted Teigh in a most loving way; I know that they were saying thanks for the moment. Teigh's exit move, this time with a little direction from the guy on the other end of his leash, was another rollover. Lots of smiles and wide eyes.

It was a great walk home for us that night.

Mount Sinai was several blocks from our apartment, and most nights I would want to take a cab so that Teigh or Belle wouldn't get too dirty walking there. It often could be tough to get a cab to stop for a dog, as the law says that cab drivers have to pick up a service dog, but picking up any other dog is up to them. So there were some things that I would do to help get us a cab.

Most of the time, I would set out for the hospital and just hide the dog behind a garbage can or a mailbox while I flagged down the cab. I would have to be quick enough so that the driver couldn't just drive off upon seeing the dog (which some occasionally did), tossing the dog in the back and then jumping in. I sometimes would have the dogs wearing their therapy vests in the hope that it would let the cab driver know that these were clean, special dogs. That didn't always help, and I usually did not have them in their vests for visits anyway. In any case, finding a cab was often a challenge, and I would sometimes find myself either arguing with drivers who had stopped or shouting something as they drove off.

Once we were in the cab, I would do whatever I could to help future considerations. To begin, the dog would ride on the floor in the back seat, something that I would happily point out. I would also tell drivers that we were going to the hospital to visit people in need, and that the dog had just had a bath. Sometimes that struck a chord with the drivers, sometimes not. In any case, I would always tip a little extra and be sure to thank the drivers for taking the dog.

Are these drivers going to pick up the next dog that they see? Maybe not—but then again, maybe.

One night, a driver picked up Belle and me for the trip to Mount Sinai.

“Hey, thanks for taking the dog,” I said as I put her on the floor and told him where we were going.

“Dogs are better than a lot of my passengers,” he said. We laughed together. “She looks very nice.”

“Thank you from us both,” I said, “She just had a bath. I'm glad someone appreciates my hard work. She's a therapy dog on her way to the hospital to visit patients.”

“They let her in the hospital?”

(One of the great things about New York City—especially with cab drivers—is the great range of cultures. For many of them, who come from countries and cultures in which dogs are afterthoughts at best and pariahs at worst, having a dog in a hospital is unimaginable. This is something else that makes it difficult to get a cab.)

Opportunity!

Here came the closer in me: “Yes, just petting the dog and talking to her makes people feel better. The people love it, the dog loves it, and I love it, too.”

“Very nice,” he said as we pulled up to the hospital.

The fare was five dollars, and I pushed a ten-dollar bill over the seat toward him.

He pushed it back. “This is on me. I think it's wonderful what you do.”

A few weeks later, Teigh and I were in the therapy room, getting ready for another night of visiting. The therapy dog program supervisor came into the room and walked over to us.

“I have a special assignment for you tonight,” she said. “Follow me.” She led Teigh and me over to the door.

“We are going to walk out of this room together,” she began. “When we get into the hall, I am going to turn left and you are going to turn right and go down to room 214 and visit with the patient in that room. I am to know nothing about this,” she said.

This sounded like the opening scene in
Mission: Impossible.
I was waiting for her to say, “I will disavow any knowledge of your operation.”

The reason for this surreptitious approach was because we were still not allowed to visit patients in their rooms. The supervisor told me that the elderly patient in room 214 was a quadriplegic woman who was hurt when she had fallen off a horse recently. The nurses wanted her to see Teigh, but she couldn't get out of bed. I guess I should have felt honored, but I didn't want to jeopardize the entire program by breaking this basic rule.

The supervisor could see what I was thinking. “Don't worry; this is going to work. Just do it.” Well, she was the boss.

Two nurses who I recognized were waiting for us at the end of the hall with sly smiles on their faces, indicating to me that they were indeed in on the plan. I picked up Teigh in my arms so the patient would see him right away, and we followed one of the nurses into the room.

“Carolyn, this is David with his dog, Teigh,” she introduced us. “We all thought that you would want to have a visit from them.”

“Well, I certainly do,” she said with a large smile. She was delightful and in good spirits, but bound to the bed as a quadriplegic. I was trying to figure out how to get Teigh to her. I turned to the nurse and asked, “Can I put him in bed with her?”

“I don't know why not,” she said.

“Get me a sheet, please, and we'll make this happen.”

I threw the sheet over the bed. “Carolyn, we are going to be careful here. Do you have any tubes or sutures?”

“No, I don't think there's anything here that you have to worry about.”

So, very carefully, I lifted Teigh onto the bed, placing him on his back, along her side. It's always a bit magical that Teigh doesn't feel like he weighs his 35 pounds when I am lifting him up to a patient.

I took Carolyn's left arm. “Can I move your arm?” I was asking both her and the nurse. Yes from both of them.

I lifted Teigh's head and wrapped Carolyn's arm around him carefully, because it occurred to me that she wouldn't feel it if it was causing a problem. The nurse pushed a chair underneath me at the bedside, and I sat down, holding on to Teigh and Carolyn.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

“I'm just fine,” she said. “I'm so glad that you could come.”

“Well, we are all making a little history at the hospital tonight. I'm glad it's with you.” I said, winking at the nurse. In keeping with the
Mission: Impossible
theme, I was imagining someone standing watch out in the hall.

I asked Carolyn if she had a dog.

“Sure, we have a couple of them at the farm,” she said, and that began a delightful conversation about her dogs, her farm, and her horses.

I tested her every once in a while. “Are you comfortable?” I'd ask. “I'm fine, Teigh's fine. It's great to have him up here with me.”

We were probably in there for about fifteen or twenty minutes. I never did look over my shoulder; I was more worried about Teigh and his new friend. When it was time to leave, I took Teigh down and pulled the cover sheet off the bed.

“That was a good visit, Carolyn,” I said. “It's easy to tell that you're a dog person; you were great with him.”

“He was so gentle. I think I was able to feel him a bit.”

Well, that would make our night. I wanted to believe it, too. And if Teigh got her to think like that, maybe it could be a little step on the road to recovery of some kind.

These days, you can't just walk into a health care facility and volunteer. You must undergo extensive orientations, background checks, and health tests. The same goes for the dogs…well, the health tests anyway.

If anyone had done a background check on Teigh and Belle, it would have been discovered that they in fact had once been busted for running loose in Carl Schurz Park on Manhattan's Upper East Side. In all fairness, I contributed to their delinquency.

Many New York City parks have dog runs, of course, and Carl Schurz has two of them—one for large dogs (over 25 pounds) and another for small dogs (under 25 pounds). Brittanys just don't fit in either category. They are just over 30 pounds, but they are a little soft to be running around with Labs and Rottweilers and the other big guys. At the same time, they are too active and a bit too large to be hanging out with the little guys.