Mock Surgery

We went to Mock Surgery at Brackenridge yesterday. SO cool. Lauren wants to be a NICU nurse, and some of it was geared towards young people wanting to go into health careers. She talked with several awesome people there about nursing school, including a nurse in charge of Seton's RN residency program, a student from Texas Tech nursing school and a NICU nurse from Seton.

They had a wide variety of stations set up all over the Clinical Education Center. They use robotic mannequins for simulation training, chock full of nifty features like pulses, voice, breathing, etc. In all the stations, you could do (or help with) procedures on them. In one room, there was a very specialized one that GAVE BIRTH.

The experience of watching the birth simulation was many things:

1) Weird. Not only because it was a room full of people pretending that this was a real person having a child, but because a mom let her two-year-old daughter volunteer to be the one to deliver the baby. The nurse helped her, but I kept thinking there would have been way too many questions from my own two-year-old, had she been doing it back then.

2) Amazing. A plastic dummy was actually ejecting a gooey, plastic baby from its girl parts. (Jeff saw the "Mannequin Lube" on the counter. I could not make this stuff up, folks. Sounds like something they would carry at the Adult Superstore for less than the hospital pays for it.) The baby and mother breathe and move. It's really something to see!

3) Hilarious. There was a staff member doing the mannequin's voice from another room, and she was screaming and asking for her husband. A woman from our group went up and gently pushed the mannequin's hair from her face and said, "It's going to be fine. You're doing a great job. I'm here." Everyone was laughing. When a couple of Texas Tech nursing students walked in, the dummy said, "Oh yay! My nursing student friends are here!" When the nurse was helping the two-year-old deliver the placenta, the little girl was somewhat disturbed by it. She asked "WHAT IS THAT?" More laughter from us. Right about then, Jeff discovered the lube. Oh man. It was like a party in a labor-delivery room.

Some mannequins are male and some are female. Problem is, they all have the same manly head. So, the female ones looked like men with breasts. (When we hit the plastic surgery station, I commented that this was where the men would come to have their breasts removed. Ha.) It turns out, those mannequins are modular and have interchangeable genitals, so the nurses said they are never sure of the sex of the dummies unless they look, and you can't tell just from the boobs or lack thereof. One nurse's comment- "This is Austin! We see everything and it's all OK with us!

At the plastic surgery area, the surgeon showed us the teensy-weensy needle and thread they use to suture veins. The sewing has to be done while viewed through a surgical microscope, which he let us look through. Then Lauren screwed a metal piece onto a shattered skull. All in a day's work.

The most amazing piece of equipment we saw was a new machine that uses sonography to visualize veins. It just shines like a light onto the skin! Perfect for people who have bad veins that are difficult to locate, to get blood samples or place an IV.

Lauren's Veins

Cool, eh?