Making Good Memories Through Music Therapy: Cole's Story

At a young age Cole was diagnosed with Psoriatic Arthritis and had to spend much more time in a hospital than any young boy would want to. Like many teenage boys, Cole enjoys lifting weights and fishing, hard things to do when confined to a hospital room.

However, when Cole met Meredith, a music therapist at C.S. Mott Children's Hospital, he was able to find a passion for something he could do during his hospital stays. Cole found a love of playing the drums through music therapy. He had wanted to play the drums for months before he met Meredith and music therapy gave him an opportunity to fulfill that dream. He is now 16 and on drumline at his school and it is an important part of his life.

Speaking about his experiences with music therapy, Cole said: "It helped me through probably one of the worst years of my life." He continued by telling me: "My sister is also pretty medically complex and in March of 2018 she had a stroke and a heart attack with a pretty low chance of survival. Every day I would play drums in music therapy and that was the one thing that brought my mind away from that and so I never stopped playing. Now every time I go in for infusions for my own condition it's kind of a fun thing."

Every Thursday at C.S. Mott Children's Hospital before the pandemic there was an event called Skyline Cafe in which pizza was served and there was live music. Music therapists and their patients often performed at these and Cole was no exception. At 11 years old he said this was "the best thing in the world" for him to get a chance and perform at this event. He told me that music therapy has always been calming for him, giving him a better ability to heal.

When Cole started music therapy he was playing drums in a small tucked-away room in the hospital because there wasn't space anywhere else for an entire drum set! This year, however, a dedicated music therapy space called Sophie's Place was opened at his hospital! Now, when he goes back to the hospital for infusions, he has a place to go and play music that is spacious and doesn't even feel like a hospital. This gives Cole and other patients like him something to look forward to during hospital stays! He says having this space during his long hospital stays when he was younger "would have been a dream come true". He spoke about how it is so amazing that kids can now use the state-of-the-art recording studio in Sophie's Place as well as have live-streamed music therapy sessions in the space.

In closing, Cole expressed that 90% of the good memories he looks back on from his hospital stay include music therapy. "I have a lot of bad memories at the hospital but I also made a lot of good memories that overlap the bad ones.", he said, speaking of his time in music therapy. As we can see through Cole's story, music therapy can do so much to encourage positive association in the hospital and can be a great tool for creating lasting memories that make the harder ones much more bearable.