Happy jungle animals swinging from branches, napping in the shade and enjoying a lazy day greet the sick children who arrive for outpatient treatment at the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center.
These funny animals from the brush of muralist Kent Peterson transform “drab” spaces in the pediatric infusion center to help children cope with needed infusions, such as chemotherapy.
Five-year-old Cooper Cochran was one of those children, an outpatient at the infusion center since he was 20 months old. But after three and a half years of treatment, on Saturday he was ready to celebrate the end of his therapy for high-risk acute lymphoblastic leukemia. As he waited for his party to begin, he pointed to a tree hollow in Peterson’s mural and exclaimed, “I see something with eyes.” Then he guessed, “Maybe a bear.”
Cooper likes “monkeys of all kinds,” said his mother, Cherie Trout, explaining Cooper’s interest in the colorful
Article source: http://www.sacbee.com/2014/01/30/6109548/the-art-of-healing.html