Stanford Report, November 8, 2006

A haunted hospital?

Veronica Weber/Palo Alto Weekly

Sameer Reddy in his Cookie Monster costume pays a trick-or-treat visit to Marilyn Corvin, a chaplain at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.

Three-year-old Sameer Reddy has been undergoing chemotherapy at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, but that didn’t stop him from trick or treating.

To make sure that Reddy and other patients did not miss out on Halloween festivities, the Packard Children’s staff decorated every hallway, desk and door on Oct. 31—even building a haunted house on the premises and turning the hospital school into a scene from Alice in Wonderland. And they set up 65 stops, where costumed kids could collect goodies.

For an evening, the hospital was turned into a place where kids with cancer, heart disease, cystic fibrosis and other illnesses could experience the thrill of Halloween even when away from home.

Reddy, wearing a Cookie Monster costume, was particularly excited upon seeing Marilyn Corvin, a hospital chaplain, who had dressed up specifically for Reddy as a characters from his favorite television show, “Thomas the Tank Engine.”

One child, who is waiting for a heart transplant, was Captain Jack Sparrow. A young leukemia patient was Tinker Bell. And Leah Willover, a 10-year-old liver transplant recipient from West Sacramento, used the holiday as an opportunity to do some role reversal: she dressed as a doctor.

But it wasn’t just a celebration by the kids, their siblings and their families. The surgical specialties unit dressed as barnyard animals. Social workers came in baseball uniforms. And staff from Admitting came as M&Ms, both plain and peanut.