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Hospital room a haven for parents  by Holly Auer  Of The Post and Courier Staff  For parents, tending to a hospitalized child is a blur of tears, medical jargon and brief snatches of sleep.  Ronald McDonald assists 7-year-old Thomas Murray with cutting the red ribbon opening the new MUSC Children's Hospital Ronald McDonald Family Room while 18-month-old Jack and Dee Dee Barnes, donors, look on. The new area, located in room 735, features a living room, full bathroom and shower, plus an Internet workstation area. The room was part of a joint project between MUSC and Ronald McDonald House Charities to provide comfort and respite for weary patient family members waiting or wanting to be nearby a loved one.  A new room at the Medical University of South Carolina’s Children’s Hospital seeks to cut through that pattern and give parents space for moments of solace in the midst of medical chaos.  In contrast to cramped, traditional waiting rooms, the Ronald McDonald Room will be furnished like a home living room, with cozy furniture, artwork and a warm, inviting color scheme. Volunteers will be on hand to help out-of-town families with the little questions (Where can I mail a package? Where’s the best cup of coffee around here?) that usually go unanswered while caring for a sick child.  “One of the things that comes out as being very important to parents is just a place to get away, a place that doesn’t look and feel and sound like a hospital,” said Barbara Bond, executive director of Ronald McDonald House Charities, which led the fund-raising efforts for the $45,000 project. “There’s children crying, alarms going off, and it’s very hard to relax in that environment.”  Pam and Michael Murray spent five weeks in 2002 sitting vigil by their 5-year-old son’s bed in the Children’s Hospital’s pediatric intensive care unit. He’d been stricken, seemingly overnight, with Guillain-Barre Syndrome, which left him paralyzed and on a ventilator. The Murrays came and went to the hospital in shifts from their Mount Pleasant home, never leaving Thomas alone.  Michael Murray crashed every night on a recliner in a waiting room 20 seconds from his son’s room, tossing and turning and waiting for the phone above his head to ring and summon him to his son’s bedside. When morning came, he’d wad up his bed linens and stuff them behind the chair.  “Your comfort is not a priority in your mind or anybody else’s, but it’s amazing how you can adapt,” he said. “But you can’t go home. It doesn’t matter if you’re only 10 minutes away, if your kid wants you, you’ve got to be there right then.”  The Murrays craved quiet, a place to go for just a few minutes and mull over the puzzling disease Thomas was fighting. The hospital’s waiting rooms were crowded and noisy, so instead they paced the halls as they talked, their heads spinning with the choices doctors had given them for their son’s rehabilitation.  “This room is going to provide a calming, safe haven where parents can go,” said Pam Murray. “We would have loved that, to go in there and sit on a sofa, to just be able to talk and reflect on all these things we were trying to process.”  Computers with an Internet connection will be a key feature in the room, since parents often need to keep in touch with work or want to research their child’s illness and treatment options on the Web.  “You’re in a distrustful situation,” Michael Murray said. “The doctors are great, but no matter what they tell you, you still want to research it yourself, and you don’t want to have to go home to do it.”  The Ronald McDonald Room also will have a full bathroom with a shower so that parents who don’t feel comfortable leaving the hospital can freshen up while their child sleeps or undergoes treatments. Children’s Hospital Administrator John Sanders said he hopes that in the coming years, similar rooms will be created in the wards like the neonatal intensive care unit, for parents to spend the night with their babies before they take them home for the first time.  “We try to make the hospital look more inviting and good for the children and parents, but the fact is it’s still a hospital,” he said. “These types of rooms can really help parents get more comfortable.” Editor's note: The above is an article that ran Nov. 22 in the Post and Courier and is printed with permission.   Friday, Nov. 26, 2004 Catalyst Online is published weekly, updated as needed and improved from time to time by the MUSC Office of Public Relations for the faculty, employees and students of the Medical University of South Carolina. Catalyst Online editor, Kim Draughn, can be reached at 792-4107 or by email, catalyst@musc.edu. Editorial copy can be submitted to Catalyst Online and to The Catalyst in print by fax, 792-6723, or by email to petersnd@musc.edu or catalyst@musc.edu. To place an ad in The Catalyst hardcopy, call Community Press at 849-1778.