The Hardy Hedgehog

Eliza is an occupational therapist at a hospital as well as at a state-run mental health facility. As a medical practitioner, she feels responsible to patients’ physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. Eliza has been able to bridge her interest in nature, animals, and art with her medical knowledge and skills, and in the state mental health facility, she brings plants and animals to the patients. Eliza works with young students, many of whom are mentally unstable and some of whom are suicidal, and she brings the natural world and animals to these children in order to work on issues of safety, trust, and caring. One of Eliza’s patients, a young boy with a history of violence who also struggled with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), gained a sense of motivation and purpose through his encounter with a hedgehog that Eliza had brought into the center. The experience with the hedgehog turned out to be a major turning point for him.

Eliza is an occupational therapist at a hospital as well as at a state-run mental-health facility. As a medical practitioner, she feels responsible to the “whole” patient—to an individual’s physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. This is not something all doctors consider these days. In her words, there are many “unseen” factors that accompany the “known” factors, and it is important to look in less obvious places. Eliza believes that when considering the human spirit, we should give “equal weight” to the body and mind.

Eliza’s beliefs about the importance of the human spirit in medical care direct her work as a practitioner working with disabled patients. Eliza’s mother is dyslexic, and at an early age Eliza realized that everyone learns in different ways. She believes that practitioners “need to support other ways of learning.” Eliza also believes that “everyone is whole no matter what their struggles,” and that medical practitioners should value an individual’s curiosity, wonder, desire to engage, and potential to be a productive member of society.

Connecting these beliefs with her formal training as a medical practitioner has become her personal and professional mission. In graduate school, there wasn’t the “luxury” to talk about “what mattered;” instead, students were encouraged to “finish their internships” and “satisfy the academic requirements.” Because of Eliza’s nontraditional beliefs about patients’ needs, she was forced to network, problem-solve, and work creatively to involve patients in taking active roles in improving their own health. She asked herself: are there other ways to help? How do we address the human spirit in terms of motivation and inspiration? How do we find a “spark” inside the patient, a reason to live and to be engaged?

Since graduate school, Eliza has been able to bridge her interests in nature, animals, and art with her medical knowledge and skills. Specifically, in state mental-health facilities, which she describes as “rough,” and “harsh,” she brings plants and animals to the patients. In collaboration with Home Depot, she and her patients build and take care of garden beds. This facilitates more interaction and more communication among patients, and the patients themselves “take more of an active process in ‘growing,’ and [begin] to think and write creatively about their dreams and their futures.”

Eliza works with young students, many of whom are mentally unstable and some of whom are suicidal. She brings the natural world and animals to children in order to work on issues of safety, trust, and caring. Through this “simple” and “powerful” work, Eliza feels confident that her projects reach individuals that others have considered “untouchable.” Through her work, she sees potential others have missed, which is helpful not only for the patients themselves, but for the practitioners:

“There [is] one little boy that, again, had lots of labels. One of his primary issues was ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder], and he just had an incredibly hard time sitting still. He also had a history of violence … And he was a kid who just was in motion all the time, and didn’t feel like he had any control over himself. He told me he couldn’t sit still, he wouldn’t be able to be there [to meet a hedgehog that Eliza was planning to bring to the students]. Then, his curiosity kind of got the better of him and, as we talked about safety for the hedgehog, he realized that, in order for the hedgehog to feel comfortable and come out and, therefore, meet his curiosity, he needed to be as still as he possibly could.

The hedgehog was probably a perfect example for him because it was the prickly exterior of a hedgehog that balls up, when they’re scared, to hide, and makes a vocal buzzing sound that also very clearly says ‘I’m scared and stay away.’ And yet, when they feel safe, they’ll walk around and they’ll expose their soft, vulnerable belly and you can see their face and their feet and things.

So, the metaphor for this child was very clear, of when the hedgehog is scared, he puts out his spines and he curls up and he buzzes. This is a little kid who spent a lot of time being afraid, being violent, hiding, curling up and in movement all the time. He was able to kind of look at this and say, well, I need to be still. So, he actually was able to be still for almost twenty minutes, which was the longest time, he said, he’d ever been still. And, it took awhile: he’d be still for five minutes; the hedgehog would just start to uncurl and feel comfortable; and then [the boy] would jump and leap and shout, and the hedgehog would curl back up, and [the boy] would then learn each time that he had power over the situation to either make it work or not.

It wasn’t about my rule to tell him to stay still or to be good or to do something for me; it was what the hedgehog needed. And if he wanted to see the hedgehog, then he needed to make the hedgehog feel safe, which virtually, makes him feel safe. So, he finally, after a series of times, probably over forty-five minutes, he then, in the last part of it, was able to stay still for twenty minutes. And the hedgehog came out and walked right up to him and he was thrilled.

Now, I heard, probably eight months later— through just a network of friends, totally by fluke—I heard about this little boy again. He had been placed with another facility, and the psychiatrist there was trying to find out what motivated him, what he liked, what had interested him in the last year. And, they couldn’t get anything out of him; he wasn’t able to identify anything he liked. And, finally, he said … ‘Oh! Well, the hedgehog’, and he told all about the hedgehog and sitting still for the hedgehog.

And this friend then repeated it to another friend; that friend repeated it to another friend, and some friend said, ‘Gosh, I know someone who takes a hedgehog to the hospital,’ and she called me and said, ‘Was that you?’ So it was a nice way of finding out the effect of that, nine months later, for this little guy. Not only did he remember it, but he felt that that was a significant, meaningful moment in his life.”

She continues:

“Part of why I work with nature and animals is that it’s so simple. And it’s so powerful simultaneously that it’s based in straight commonsense and joy and engagement and pleasure. And yet the way it can touch people can reverberate along in many unspoken, unknown ways that we don’t always know what is going to touch someone. And how it will affect them, six years later or whatever.”

Eliza’s long-term plan, she explains, is to develop a residential center that is focused on holistic health for both children and the elderly. She hopes that other nonprofit organizations will want to collaborate and that this will be the beginning of a new approach to treating patients.

Eliza often works in facilities that she describes as “harsh”, yet the way she describes her work is in very different terms. How do you account for this difference? To whom or what do you believe Eliza feels responsible in her work?