Madison Shumway
Staff Writer
Taylor Day slips on a lab coat and starts her shift at the School of Nursing’s simulation lab.
This week, she’s already taken inventory of various silicone body parts and painted a training model, giving his wincing face eyebrows, black eyes and a leaking head wound. High school seniors will visit the lab today and see her handiwork.
Cleaning detachable bedsores and applying angry, chartreuse bruising to a manikin is all in a day’s work for this School of Nursing Career Path Intern. Her job description includes not only model makeup, but other tasks for preparing the lab for nursing students to practice and test skills.
Students can insert IVs and catheters, check blood pressure and stitch wounds on the fleshy, lifelike manikin and models called “task trainers” before moving on to real patients in clinical settings.
“It gives them real life experience where they’re not going to kill a patient, so they can practice with all the stuff and feel confident in a skill before they go and do that on a real life patient,” Day said. “So then they’re making their mistakes where it doesn’t matter as much, rather than when it really matters, and that’s really cool.”
On this morning Day, a pre-nursing freshman, leads the visiting high-schoolers through the lab.
One manikin, lying supine in a hospital bed, mimics heart and lung sounds. Students with stethoscopes crowd around the figure as Day runs through healthy lungs and heart, asthma, pneumonia, a heart murmur and a mitral valve prolapse.
The manikin on the next bed models a femoral and radial pulse. Pressing fingers to a pad on the model’s wrist, one can feel the even surge of a simulated heartbeat.
Day moves to the moulage lab, which acts as a sort of Sephora counter for simulation dummies. Multicolored costume makeup, liquid latex, syringes of fake blood and an array of makeup brushes and carving tools lay scattered around a model in progress.
When nursing students participate in simulations, Day explains, the made-up models provide realism down to the gruesome, gory details.
In a small room just next to the moulage lab rests METIMan, a sophisticated simulation tool that recreates real-life emergency situations. METIman can respond to questions and perform an extensive repertoire of actions, making intensive testing simulations possible.
“This is limited by my imagination … by how much I want to throw at it,” said Chris Smout, a clinical assistant professor at the School of Nursing, as he shows the model to visiting students.
Later, Day showcases METIMan’s abilities. Within one minute window, he screams, counts down from 10, winks and convulses, all the while breathing and blinking like a real human.
A few rooms over, an obstetric simulation model named Noelle gives birth to a plastic baby. Despite visible hinges and wiring, the moans and groans the models emit blur the line between robot and real.
The loose appendages Day cleans and organizes in cupboards are also bizarrely lifelike, with veins, waxy skin and proportional anatomy. When she opens a cabinet of task trainers used to practice catheter insertion, seeing a jumble of silicon buttocks is jarring.
Day cleans and inventories the body parts regularly. After she shows off the back room, stocked with bins of arms, penises and everything in between, she relates her own experiences with nursing.
When she was young, her brother stayed at the hospital for heart problems, she said. A kind nurse explained the IV insertion process to a five-year-old Day using a doll, and the event stuck with her as she grew up.
As a graduating high school senior, attending ISU in the nursing program felt like a natural choice for her.
She will apply to the program after taking the required prerequisite courses.
Until then, she’ll prepare Skittles pills, scrub fake body parts and create gaping wounds with makeup.
“Everything I do is weird,” Day said. “But it’s all weird for a reason. Like the weird task trainers for catheters: we have to have those so that they’re not just poking real people down there and not knowing what they’re doing. It’s kind of organized chaos down here, and it’s great.”
