Memorial Health System in Colorado Springs delivers a dazzling array of high-tech medical care that spans the entirety of a human life, from neonatal intensive care through cardiothoracic and neurosurgery to end-stage cancer treatment.
But one of the most potent weapons in its health-care arsenal is a decidedly low-tech healer who’s outfitted with nothing more than sneakers, a sunny disposition and the royal blue volunteer vest that bears his name: Sprout. Every other Wednesday, the miniature horse — he stands a scant 35 inches at the shoulder and weighs 250 pounds — wends his way through the hospital, where he evokes a spontaneous delight that briefly banishes the specter of sickness and stress.
“Nobody would ever expect to see a horse in the hospital, and I think it makes people happy,” says Leigh Frasier, youth programs coordinator at Memorial. “It’s amazing to see the happiness on people’s faces – and the surprise – when the elevator opens, and there’s a horse standing there.”
A horse in sneakers, no less. Made for teddy bears, the shoes are a novel solution to the hospital’s slippery linoleum floors, on which Sprout fell during an early visit. The footwear — he has several sets of varying colors — provides traction as well as panache.
Sustained by apples, carrots, Cheerios and the occasional peppermint, the petite pinto typically spends 90 minutes to two hours at the hospital, visiting pediatrics, rehabilitation and outpatient oncology as well as poking his pert ears into patients’ rooms. At the other end of his halter rope is veteran equestrian and owner Gretchen Long, who has known 14-year-old Sprout since he was 2.
“When we’re at the hospital, even though it’s for a short period of time, we touch so many people in one visit,” she says. “It’s not just about the patients; it’s about everybody who is just wandering through the hallways who stops and sees him. A lot of times, it’s just a great distraction.”
One hallway encounter involved a Hispanic woman walking her mother to oncology in a wheelchair. “I walked over to her,” Long recalls, “and Sprout, as soon as he zeroed in on her, put his head right into her lap. She got very animated and started talking to me in Spanish about the horse, and then started telling me in English about having a horse as a child and growing up with horses.
“… as we broke away from each other, her daughter thanked me profusely. She said her mother had not been that animated or spoken that much in months.”
Long remembers a special-request visit with a boy who had a severe brain injury. “They specifically asked me to visit him because he’d been in the hospital for several days and was pretty much unresponsive — in a wheelchair, kind of strapped in,” she says. “He couldn’t sit up by himself. … I later found out that he was in foster care and had been beaten.
“We brought him down to Sprout and you could see the reaction in his eyes right away. And then he reached out and grabbed Sprout’s mane, which was huge because he hadn’t shown any motor skills at all.”
That night, the boy started speaking, and when Long returned the following week with her therapy dog, he was sitting up on his own and talking. Within a few weeks, he was discharged.
Frasier
recalls a hallway encounter with a woman and her daughter, who had severe cerebral palsy and was in a wheelchair.
“Without saying a word or leading him up, Sprout walked up to her, and he smelt her and just put his head on her shoulder,” Frasier says. “And he stayed there for a couple of minutes. She was very excited in the beginning, and then she just calmed; this calm came over both of them. And I looked at Gretchen and said, ‘That’s what this is all about.’ “
What might be a hygeine concern for a therapy horse in a sanitized hospital setting hasn’t been a problem for Sprout. If nature calls in the middle of a hospital visit, Sprout lets Long know by pawing the floor.
Long often doesn’t fully appreciate the emotional impact of their visits until Sprout is back at the barn.
“I think about the reaction of somebody, or who he touched,” she says. “And I always feel that both he and I get a lot out of it.”
Former Denver Post staff writer Cate Terwilliger teaches multimedia journalism at Northern Michigan University in the Upper Peninsula.
Online: See Sprout at work: Slideshow and video denverpost.com/athome
