Kathy Lorenzato was walking through the burn unit at the UC Davis Medical Center when she came upon a 3-year-old patient walking for the first time with his physical therapist.

This child, who just the day before had been singing and laughing with Lorenzato, was now screaming in pain.

So Lorenzato did what comes naturally to her. She said, “I think we need a marching song,” grabbed her guitar and started playing “The Ants Go Marching.”

“This little boy fell right into step,” Lorenzato recalled. “He stopped screaming and walked the entire length of the burn unit with his physical therapist. At the end of the hall, we ran out of song and the child resumed screaming. The physical therapist looked up at me and frantically said, ‘Sing another song!’”

So she did. And as has often proved the case in her nearly 30 years as a music therapist, Lorenzato’s music provided something that even the strongest pain medication could not: distraction, comfort and just a little bit of joy in a place where it can be so hard to find.

It’s what she does on a daily basis for sick, injured and even dying children on the pediatrics floor of the medical center.

Whether it’s distracting the youngest patients from their pain with silly songs, engaging a bored teen stuck in isolation with piano lessons, or singing softly with a family at the bedside of a dying child, the longtime Davis resident uses her passion for music to bring some measure of comfort to children who need it the most.

Check out Kathy Lorenzato’s book about music therapy, “Filling a Need While Making Some Noise.”

Read about Red Balloon, a UC Davis Med Center music therapy program that recently helped its founder win a $10,000 prize.

Learn more about music therapy generally from the American Music Therapy Association.

Donate to UCD med center’s art therapy programs here.

It’s not something she ever imagined she would be doing.

“I don’t know how I ended up on pediatrics,” she says. “If someone had told me I’d be working with dying children every day … I’d have said they were crazy.”

Lorenzato first heard about the field of music therapy in her senior year at the College of Notre Dame in Belmont, where she was earning a degree in piano performance. She knew instantly it’s what she wanted to do. She enrolled in the music therapy program at Long Beach State University and received her certificate of music therapy in 1981.

From there, she did various internships and externships, including one at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Stockton. It was there she realized that working in a hospital was were she belonged. For a performance pianist who was “always prepared to the Nth degree,” Lorenzato found working in a hospital, where every day brought the unexpected, oddly thrilling.

In 1988, she started the music therapy program at the UC Davis Medical Center.

Since then she has met, entertained and befriended more children than she can count. She is a constant, a familiar face to children with chronic diseases like sickle cell anemia and cystic fibrosis who repeatedly find themselves hospitalized.

Leah Bailey was one such child. Now 28 and living in Roseville, Bailey first met Lorenzato when she was 5 years old and hospitalized with cystic fibrosis.

“When I was younger,” Bailey said, “I would have to be hospitalized for two or three weeks at a time every couple of months and Kathy is what I would always look forward to. When she was around, you didn’t feel like you were in the hospital. It really made those two or three weeks fly by.”

Most patients encounter Lorenzato for the first time at the daily music group she holds in the playroom of the pediatrics ward, a place where almost anything goes and Lorenzato never knows who to expect.

Sometimes it will be a couple of children. Other days, it’s standing room only, where whole families come to bang on drums, let off some steam and laugh a little.

Lorenzato’s bag of tricks is a bag of noise: shakers, bells, rattles and all size and manner of drums. She has a closet full of keyboards, guitars, and an unending playlist of songs to sing – the sillier, the better.

Eight-year-old Juan Garcia certainly got into the spirit one day last week. One of just two patients that day, Garcia had his pick of the instruments, and made the most of it, wearing bells on his arms and feet and using two drumsticks to play an array of drums.

“You are totally amazing,” Lorenzato told him. “An amazing one-man sitting band.”

Were it not for his IV, Garcia said, he could play even more instruments.

Though music group is a happy place, it often inadvertently serves as a place of rehabilitation as well.

Lorenzato recalled one young boy who had suffered a stroke and was undergoing extensive inpatient rehabilitation at the medical center to regain movement in his body.

“He’d always been a musical kid before his stroke,” she noted, “and now in music therapy group he was able to coordinate many parts of his body — tapping his foot to the beat, playing a rhythm on the drum, bobbing his torso up and down, and singing a song — all at the same time. A combination of bodily movements that would have required too much concentration under other circumstances was attained effortlessly while he was swept up in the music and the process of having a good time.”

Almost without them knowing it, she said, children are working on rehabilitation goals – using their hands, sequencing, memory, “and all in a really fun environment.”

When a child is too ill to come to music group, Lorenzato brings her songs and instruments to them, whether it’s in an isolation room, the pediatric intensive care unit or anywhere else in the hospital.

Ian Davidson was 12 years old when he first met Lorenzato. Hospitalized with complex regional pain syndrome, a condition caused by severe nerve damage, Davidson was in such constant, excruciating pain that he had told his family, “I don’t want to be here any more.”

“At first we thought he meant he didn’t want to be in the hospital,” his mother, Dorothy Davidson said. “But then we realized he meant that he literally didn’t want to be here any more. He couldn’t deal with the pain any more.”

A nurse suggested Ian and his family meet with Lorenzato.

“I didn’t even know we had a music therapist,” said Davidson, who works at the hospital’s Center for Virtual Care. “But we were willing to do anything at that point. Anything to help him.”

And what morphine couldn’t do for Ian, it turned out music — and Lorenzato — could.

“She came in and sat down with Ian, talked to him not just about music, but about being a kid. She brought in a keyboard and taught him to play some pieces. And even when he was at his lowest, in the worst pain, I would come in and he’d say, ‘Mom, do you want to see what I can play?'”

When pain levels spiked, and Ian was sweating and breathing fast, he’d say, “Keyboard … keyboard.”

They’d set up his keyboard, Davidson said, and more often than not, playing would soothe him.

“Ian said it was not just the music or the sound that helped him; it was concentrating on the notes. Some notes he could play over and over again and they would give him a purpose, an ability to focus.”

“Music therapy does something,” Davidson said. “But after watching Kathy with Ian, and with other children, I never saw her as a ‘music therapist.’ I considered her part of the treatment team. I will always be grateful to her.”

Ian is home now, and has moved from a wheelchair to crutches to being able to walk on his own again. But he still has pain. And when the pain or anxiety or fear hits, Davidson will see him head to the piano.

He found particular solace in music when a close friend from the hospital, Kanishka Porage, died of cancer not long after Ian returned home.

“It was a difficult time for him,” Davidson said. “He and Kanishka were very close and both boys had the same interests. They would listen to music, play video games and talk about when they would be able to be home again with friends and family so they could play like kids do.

“When Ian found out Kanishka died, he was devastated. One of the things Ian did in the middle of heavy grieving periods, besides trying to talk it out, was to play the piano. He also played music on his earphones and tried to concentrate on what Kathy had taught him about soothing himself with music. It did help him through some very rocky days where he was having a hard time getting through physical therapy or just having a hard time understanding the loss of his good friend.”

Ian is just one of many children who’ve taken what they learned from Lorenzato — whether it’s how to play an instrument, or how to use music to deal with pain, fear or anxiety — back home with them.

Many then return to visit Lorenzato over and over again. And no wonder. According to Bailey, Lorenzato is so much more than a music therapist. Bailey’s cystic fibrosis, along with the repeated hospitalizations, frequently left her depressed. Psychologists would be sent to her room, she said, but she never wanted to talk to them.

When Lorenzato appeared though, “I opened up to her so easily,” Bailey said. “She is so easy to talk to. I could tell her whatever I was worried about or afraid of. And she would sit down and get me to laugh when nobody else could.”

What most amazes Bailey, though, is Lorenzato’s heart.

“I’ve lost countless friends I’ve made at the hospital,” Bailey said. “Watching them get sicker and eventually pass away is very difficult and no matter how many friends I’ve lost, it never gets easier.

“(But) the friends I’ve made and lost are only a fraction compared to what Kathy has lost. She goes to work every day knowing she may be setting herself up for another loss, but thinks it’s more important to brighten these kids’ days than to think about her own heart breaking again. I don’t know many people who can do that.”

It’s not always easy, Lorenzato concedes.

She talks of the patients she didn’t think she could survive losing, of the many, many days she held it together all day, then came home and cried. She says she’s been inside just about every church in Northern California, seen far too many three-foot-long caskets and is able to get through it and continue doing what she’s doing only because of the support of her colleagues on the pediatrics staff.

“They are so great, so loving. There was a period a few years ago when we lost so many patients and it was really, really rough. If we didn’t have the staff we had, it would have been really hard to keep going.”

And in the end, she says of her job, “the good outweighs the bad.”

Even when the bad is as bad as it gets. Like the death of a 3-year-old leukemia patient Lorenzato had come to know well.

In those final hours, Lorenzato entered the little girl’s room to find her surrounded by her family. She was chemically sedated, but still her little heart was racing. Fear, perhaps, said Lorenzato, or anxiety.

So she began to sing the songs they’d sung together at music group, “and as I sang to her, you could see the numbers drop, her heart rate slowing down.

“There was nothing else we could have done,” she recalled.

“Hearing is the last sense to go, so we’ve been at deathbeds where the whole family is there, and we sing together. It’s a beautiful way to say goodbye.”

To be able to do that, to be there for these children and their families, Lorenzato says, “is an honor.”

And she doesn’t plan to stop any time soon.

How you can help:

Lorenzato gladly accepts donations of musical instruments to replace those worn out and broken by heavy use. Skilled musicians are also welcome to come entertain and share their craft with children on the pediatrics ward. Contact Lorenzato at [email protected]

— Reach Anne Ternus-Bellamy at [email protected] or (530) 747-8051.

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Juan Garcia perfects his one-mand-band status as he enjoys a music therapy session with Kathy Lorenzato. Sue Cockrell/Enterprise photo

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Kathy Lorenzato leads a music session with patient Juan Garcia with participation from volunteers Mary Hopkins, center, and Kimberly Dunbar, top right, and hospital intern Dan Beseda, left. Sue Cockrell/Enterprise photo

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Juan Garcia, 8, gets his groove on during a music therapy session. Sue Cockrell/Enterprise photo

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Davis resident Kathy Lorenzato runs the music program at the UCD Medical Center pediatrics department. Says Lorenzato of her often emotional job, “If someone had told me I’d be working with dying children every day … I’d have said they were crazy.” Sue Cockrell/Enterprise photo

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Ian Davidson, right, was good friends with Kanishka Porage, who died of cancer not long after Ian returned home. Courtesy photo

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