She couldn’t see her family from her hospital window, so they sent something she could

Namaste Kanz was lying in her hospital bed on the third floor of Providence St. Peter Hospital on July 4, waiting to hear from doctors about a possible pneumonia diagnosis. Then she received a call from her husband.

“Look out the window,” he said.

That’s when two balloons, one in the shape of a sun and the other a sea horse, floated up to greet her.

“It was so funny,” Kanz said with a laugh. “It was really great!”

Her husband, Dan Page, and their daughter, Nayomi Kanz, have been unable to visit the hospital due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and even though she had only been admitted for two days, they still wanted to remind their wife and mother they were thinking of her. They initially planned on waiving to her from the parking lot, but the view from her room’s window excluded the lot.

“We had to put our heads together to come up with something,” Page said.

The duo decided to buy two balloons to remind Kanz of their trips out to one her favorite places: Kalaloch campground, on the Olympic Peninsula’s ocean beach near Forks.

Then they had to tackle the issue of the view: Tying the two balloons to one of Page’s old fishing reels, they cast the line out — or up, rather — to the window.

“As I’m lying in bed, these two balloons rise up,” Kanz recalls.

She was not the only person to see. Soon, nurses started coming into Kanz’s room to get a better look, all excited and happy to see such a cute display. Other patients on her floor saw the balloons from their windows, too, which brought smiles to everyone’s faces, Kanz said.

As the balloons floated around the building, they would dip down to the second floor where Intensive Care Unit (ICU) patients and nurses could see them. An ICU nurse later came up and told Kanz that she and her patients had all enjoyed the balloons. “I think it really made a lot of people happy,” Kanz said.

Keeping happy, along with staying healthy, is a top priority for the Kanz-Page family right now. Kanz herself has been dealing with a cancer diagnosis and has to be cautious navigating a world in the midst of a pandemic. An additional trip to the hospital for a possible case of pneumonia added to the stress she or her family have been feeling, and the separation only compounded it.

When it comes to making each other happy in such difficult circumstances, “you just have to do the best that you can,” Page told The Olympian. In this case, floating some balloons outside his wife’s window turned out to be just what the doctor ordered.

When speaking with The Olympian, Kanz cracked jokes and spoke confidently about upcoming tests and the tribulations of her current situation.

“Any bit of sunshine is nice in these trying times,” she said.

The balloons drifted around outside the hospital for the next few days and whenever the strings got tangled or caught on something, a nurse would step out and fix them so they would remain visible, Page told The Olympian.

This story was originally published July 8, 2020 at 5:45 AM.