HEALING ARTS PROGRAM AT ARNOLD PALMER HOSPITAL

by Sandra Mathers, The Orlando Sentinel, January 3, 1999, p. K1, K-4

The “Queen of Hearts,” a red crown riding high atop her blond curls, sashayed into the hospital room with all the aplomb of the British Royal she pretended to be. She knew at a glance that cheering up this child wasn’t going to be easy.

Lillyan Santos, 8, sat hunched over in pain in a wheelchair. She was awaiting the gurney that would take her to surgery, where doctors would remove her ruptured appendix. Her large solemn eyes locked onto Anne Curtis, the red-clad queen, and the turtle hand puppet she held. Like the turtle, Lillyan was too shy and afraid at first to come out of her shell. But minutes later – when the gurney finally came – Lillyan was waving her magic heart wand and blowing bubbles to the tape-recorded strains of “Colors of the Wind.”

For Curtis, an actor and former drama coach, turning sad faces into smiling ones is all in a morning’s work in the Healing Arts program at Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children and Women in Orlando. A former drama coach at Edyth Bush Civic Theatre, Curtis helped launch the 2-year-old program that uses the therapeutic powers of comedy to promote healing in seriously ill children.

“Kids see me and know there’s no way an idiot dressed like this is going to give them a shot,” she says of her long, fire-engine red dress. Instead, Curtis resorts to slap-stick, “magic boxes” full of invisible things, “imagination” hats, wands with streamers and fun stories to coax smiles and laughter to sad faces. The whole idea, she says, is to involved sick kids in creative play as an antidote to pain and the unfamiliar surroundings of a hospital.

You could call it the Patch Adams approach. The recently released Robin Williams movie also explore the thesis that laughter is, indeed, the best medicine. “Creative dramatics in a hospital is totally new, “ Curtis said. “I don’t think anyone’s doing it.” Curtis said she took the idea “that just wouldn’t go away” to Arnold Palmer after getting involved in a children’s Christmas pageant at the hospital several years ago. Her timing, she said, was perfect. It was during Curtis’ first show at Arnold Palmer that she met Nicole Endre. The 6-year-old daughter of Patti and Tom Endre of Orlando was waiting surgery to remove tumors associated with neuroblastoma, a deadly form of cancer that attacks the sympathetic nervous system.

“Nicole wanted to go down [to surgery] in a wheelchair, but they brought up a stretcher and her face just fell,” recalled her mother, Patti Endre. “But Anne caught her crestfallen look and changed the stretcher into a royal coach and accompanied us down to surgery.” There, Curtis continued her story of “Rumpelstiltskin” as Nicole lay in a curtained cubicle in the surgical area. Patti Endre says she’ll never forget the magic Curtis created that day for Endre’s anxious daughter who knew all too well what lay ahead.

Nicole endured more than a dozen operations. That one was her last. She died in July 1996, four months after her sixth birthday. “We saw her smiling and relaxed,” Patti Endre said of her daughter’s final surgery. “It really made a difference. It’s a great benefit for parents, too.”

Today the Endres are the program’s “dream team” and chief fund raisers. Shortly after the daughter’s death, they established a $15,000 endowment in Nicole’s name to help expand the Healing Arts Program. Limited by a $30,000 budget this year, the program can only schedule paid performers such as Curtis – a harpist, children’s author and puppeteers also are enlisted – once a week or less.

The Healing Arts program is supported, but not funded, by the not-for-profit hospital, a spokeswoman said. “If I could have my dream, I’d have someone at the hospital every day,” said Endre, vice president of merchandise at Orlando’s Planet Hollywood restaurant. She and her husband, Tom, a marketing consultant, want to raise $100,00 to add music, art and literary therapists to the program. Lillyan’s mother, Nora Santos, hopes the fund-raising effort succeeds. She said the Queen of Hearts’ impromptu visit cheered up her frightened daughter. “She really enjoyed it, “ Santos said. “It’s adorable.”