The Volunteer Hub at the Royal Edinburgh

Mike Avern and Otto the therapet

How do you like to spend your time generally?

In retirement since 2019, lazy mornings! My time is taken up by renovating and working on my old house and I do a lot of dog walking, walking in the hills and so forth. One of my passions is the collecting of vinyl, of records. Also, I’m into photography, it’s kinda gone by the wayside, walking 3 dogs in the countryside with a bag full of lenses etc, difficult to concentrate on that. But it’s amazing what you can do with a good quality phone camera sometimes.

So have you got a broad taste in music?

It’s fairly broad. If I like it, I’ll listen to it, but my main interest is in the collecting of the folk revival, let’s say through the Greenwich Village folk revival in America up to the 70s and the same in the UK. As well as of course urban blues, electric blues, I’m very interested in blues music.

What kind of decks do you have?

Turntable? It’s a Linn Sondek, a good Glasgow make, a good Scottish make. I used to have a Dunlop Systemdek, that was made in Ayrshire I believe, with a plate glass turntable. They are still in existence I believe, but they call themselves Systemdek now.

Are you a cat or a dog person?

Haha! (laughs) I’m a dog person now! I do have a cat; at one point we had 5 cats and 2 dogs, or was it 1 dog and 5 cats! Strays moved in, and the neighbour’s cat moved in! All my life I’ve been a cat person, I was brought up with cats. But yeah, we now have 3 dogs and 1 cat so erm I’m definitely a dog person now.

What did you do before you retired?

Well, I left school in 1971 and, eh, I bummed about a little bit, a couple of dead end jobs and I did a bit of travelling in America.

I worked here, in MacKinnon House, as a nursing assistant, so I could gain an insight as to what it would be like to work in a psychiatric hospital, and I did that for maybe a year. Then I spent 28 years with Northern Light, stage and theatre technology, rigging everything from Scottish Opera, Scottish Ballet, T in The Park, military Tattoo. After a lifetime of working with staging and heavy lighting and 3 spinal operations because of working with all that heavy stuff, I retrained within the company as a draftsman, using autoCAD and worked on theatre projects all over the world doing the technical drawings on projects.

How did you get into volunteering and therapets?

Well, I think it was one day, Fiona my wife, she just mentioned that Otto would make a great therapy dog. I’d read about therapets, but I hadn’t thought about it much. We talked about what an amazing nature he’s got; he has magic therapeutic qualities about him, those eyes and his gentle nature, his love for people. Especially considering the background, the violent background he’s had as a street dog.

Tell us how Otto came into your life.

He came into our life because we have another dog, who’s an unwanted farm dog from down in Norfolk, and we thought she needs a companion. Our other old dog Tinker had died. And we didn’t want to get a pure-bred dog, we wanted to rescue a dog - there’s too many dogs needing rescued. We went to Paws2Rescue. They rescue dogs from Romania; you will find that a lot of rescue dogs in this country come from Romania! It has the world’s worst street dog problem. We saw Otto on their website. He had been hit by a truck and the driver was witnessed throwing him down a ravine into a river. Some children heard whining at some point. He had been lying half in and half out of the water for several days. Worms had attached themselves to him and so forth. The vets sorted him out and put him back together again but he has a paralysed, unfeeling, nerve-damaged rear leg and his left side is held together with metal plates and pins. Eventually he came over in one of the several happy vans that come over every month.

We’ve had him since 2019 and they reckon he is about 5 years old.

What do you do with Otto here at the hospital?

Personally, I don’t do much! I sit back and I chat with the patients and with the nurses, and there is no lack of that going on, because everyone is fascinated by Otto when they come across him. He will sit beside the patient, he will sit on their lap, lie on their lap, they stroke him, and he will not leave their side. They talk to him, and sometimes me! The OT will sit with us as well. Of course, there is no end of other patients coming and going along the corridor, past the seating area, and staff members, who all stop to say hello and stroke Otto as well.

When we come in, the patient could be a bit low, a bit down that day, not wanting to do much. But when they are encouraged to come out and meet Otto, you can see them glowing. That short period of time can really bring people out of their shell.

It’s about him looking up at you, allowing himself to be stroked, sitting next to you.

What do you get out of doing therapets?

As I said I’ve now turned into a dog freak. I love the way that Otto - who has been through a lot of trauma in his early life - can, in turn, bring comfort and a bit of peace of mind, even if it is for a short period of time, to someone else. I just love to see the effect that he has on a human being. I just love the way that an animal can help us humans with our mental health through just being there. To be talked to, to be stroked and just looking into each other’s eyes, it’s amazing how that works.