A Seattle Children’s Hospital Patient Has Her Kitty Wishes Come True

By Rachel Belle

Listen to New Seattle Children’s Hospital Video Makes Kitty Wishes Come True

Lying in a hospital bed for weeks or months on end is pretty unbearable. Children’s hospitals have programs set up to entertain kids who are stuck between four white walls while their healthy friends are out at play. But teenagers and young adults are often forgotten. At Seattle Children’s Hospital there is an artist-in-residence named John Blalock who spends his days doing fun projects with the 15 to 25-year-olds.

“I’m kind of game for anything. I’m the door-to-door salesman. I knock on the door and my main thing is trying to find out what they’re interested in and what they want to do. I like to sort of tease out whatever sort of weird idea, or interesting idea, that a patient has and then just do it.”

His latest project involves a YouTube video that’s been watched by more than 93,000 people. It features a 16-year-old girl named Maga.

“She’s had a bone marrow transplant, so she’s been here for a long time. She is amazing. She has a really gregarious personality and she goes around and meets everybody on the floor. Everybody knows Maga: parents, other patients, all of the staff. So she’s really close to all of our hearts.”

Maga has been missing her cat, Merry, so John wanted to help bring the cats to Maga’s hospital room, where she’d been isolated for weeks.

“The first thing I did was go around to the nurses on the unit and was like ‘Who’s got cats? Can you just email me cat pictures?’ It was really important that it was like, ‘I love my cat’ and not just random cats grabbed from the Internet. We posted it on the Seattle Children’s Facebook page and it just blew up. We got over 3,000 pictures. Then Maga made a fort over her bed, just the classic sheet tent, and then we projected using LED projectors. [We had] two slide shows going simultaneously onto either side of the tent. We got some cat purring sounds and we put them in a subwoofer and tucked that into the bed so it kind of made the bed vibrate.”

Maga was in on the planning, but she had no idea when her cat room would actually happen.

“She’d just fallen asleep and so we were like, ‘Ok, let’s sneak in and set it up.’ So we snuck in and, literally, she woke up surrounded by cats with the purring. It was awesome! It was just so adorable! Just ’cause she really loved the cats.”

John is also responsible for the video that’s gotten more than two million hits, featuring the kids on Seattle Children’s hemoncology floor lip synching to Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger.”

“We did the Stronger video. I knocked on Chris’ door one day and I was like, ‘Oh, you’re a new patient. What are your interests?’ He loved making videos, he did a lot of video production.”

Digging out these talents, and engaging these kids in projects doesn’t only cure boredom, it keeps them positive, engaged and alive.

“Our younger kids tend to be able to occupy themselves more, they have that kind of magical thinking. But for teens and young adults, it’s kind of hard to get them out of their rooms to do stuff. You have a bone marrow transplant where you’re in for, say, months or chemotherapy where you’re in for weeks at a time and you’re really tired. That kind of feeds on itself. Once you get them excited about something, all of a sudden that tiredness just melts away and all of they’re entirely creative and gregarious and hilarious.”