By Brenda S. Miles
This isn't a story. It's a gentle rhyming script you read aloud to a child who's in pain, offering calm pictures for their mind to settle on while they wait.
There's no plot and no character. It's a sequence of images in quiet rhyme, read to a child who is hurting: warm rain, wind moving softly, a puppy to curl up with, clouds passing overhead, a rainbow, a field of daisies and grass. The pictures are watercolor-soft and the lines are short. You read it slowly, the child breathes and follows the pictures, and that's the whole book. It's guided imagery, which is a real technique that pain teams use, put in a form a child will sit still for. There's a long note to parents in the back that explains the imagery, the breathing, and how to use both.
This one is for the waiting, not the illness itself. It doesn't matter what your child has; what matters is that right now they hurt and there's nothing to do but wait for the medicine to work. Those hours are long, and a frightened child with nothing to hold onto often has a harder time of them. This gives you something to do with your voice. It comes from Magination Press, the American Psychological Association's children's imprint, and it's built on guided imagery, a technique pain teams use. In practice that means it's short, repetitive, and undemanding, and it can work even when your child is too worn out to follow a story. Keep it in the hospital bag.