Creativity abounds as young patients reveal their Halloween costumes in hospital parade
Volunteers spent more than 70 hours creating the wheelchair-friendly costumes.
It was a Halloween parade of creativity and wonder for some current and former young patients at a Michigan hospital recently.
On Saturday, the Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Hospital in Grand Rapids held its third annual Halloween Heroes wheelchair parade featuring 27 of its pediatric patients of past and present.
There were movie characters, superheroes and even a rubber duck sitting amid a tub of bubbles, some real and some fake.
"For weeks, Mary Free Bed staff and community volunteers have been creating the rolling works-of-art for the third annual event with university engineering students, employees of a local construction company and police officers," the hospital said in a news release.
Chris Mills, a spokesman for the hospital, told ABC News on Wednesday that volunteers had spent more than 70 hours building costumes that would fit around the children's wheelchairs.
The event also included a performance from a high school marching band, face-painting, children being invited to check out some rescue personnel vehicles and therapy animals.
The children's elaborate costumes ranged from the Polar Express, complete with a coal car; a tank with a moving turret; a carriage fit for a princess; and even a green Lamborghini.
Family and friends also held up posters and cheered as each child's costume was revealed.
"Often kids with disabilities have lives filled with constraints. Mary Free Bed's Halloween Heroes is a chance for them to be whatever they want to be for Halloween -- no matter what it takes," Jane Brierley, vice president of the hospital's external relations, told ABC News on Wednesday. "The kids get to keep the costumes, wear them at school and be the Halloween heroes that they really are."
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