Send in the clowns
As Leah Rumack reports,therapeutic clowns Nurse Flutter and Nurse Polo bring joy to kids when they need it most. Here, they play for Kristina Dittmar’s camera
“Clowns” may not generally be considered an essential service, but at the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital, they definitely are. Manuel Rodriguez (a.k.a. Nurse Polo) and Suzette Araujo (a.k.a. Nurse Flutter) are the in-house therapeutic clowns at the facility, where you’ll find kids with some of the most complicated health issues in Toronto, including brain injuries, serious damage from accidents and other health challenges, and who therefore require intensive rehab or longterm residential care. The clowns’ work, which incorporates music, slapstick, singing, dancing and a mega-dose of improv, is considered so important to the wellbeing of the patients that they never stopped working, even during the early days of the pandemic — they just learned to make people laugh while wearing a lot of PPE.
How do you explain therapeutic clowning to people?
Manuel: “A parent once said it best to me: ‘You’re like a big, live toy for the kids to play with.’ We work with the other staff like nurses and physiotherapists a lot. For example, there’s one threeyear-old who had a stroke, and we play with him when he rides his therapy bike through the halls. He chases us and we pretend we’re so afraid for our lives in this really silly way, and he has such a blast that he doesn’t even realize he’s going through painful rehab.”
Do the teenagers ever think they’re too cool for clowns?
Suzette: “We had a 15-year-old with scoliosis who was in a lot of pain. When we introduced ourselves, she mouthed ‘Help me’ to her dad, and we were like ‘This girl is awesome, she has a sense of humour!’ Now she directs us in TikTok dances, and she pretends her shirt has a voice and we have to obey everything it says, like getting locked in her bathroom. She went from ‘help me’ to now she’ll barely let us leave!”
What’s the most challenging part about your job?
Suzette: “We try to find the joyful moments in the present, but you do sometimes fall in love with your clients, so it’s really hard when you get bad news.” What do you love most about your job? Manuel: “The child in me wants to play all the time, and therapeutic clowning is completely set up for that — it’s almost therapy for me too.”