That's no dummy. That's my patient.

Have you ever seen a ventriloquist? For real I mean, not on TV. I only have once, at the after-prom party my junior year of high school. Or maybe it was at the Improv in Chicago. They're so similar I don't remember which it was. Either way, after watching the ventriloquist manhandle his dummy and do a preTTy bad job of giving it a voice, anything kind of resembling a fake human being has given me the creeps. Haunted houses are no problem - they're fake (hmm?) ghouls and I love that - but I usually pick up the pace if I have to walk past a department store dummy (only to run into the dummies chasing people with perfume spritzers. which is one reason I haven't been inside a mall in almost four years. uh-huh). Avoiding those has been pretty manageable so far.

And then I decided that changing careers was the best idea, ever (and, it still is). When I chose this graduate program I knew that classmates and I would be spending lots of time with cadavers, at the beginning. Which was just fine. But no one told me we'd also be practicing patient care skills on hospital dummies. I should call them mannequins, but I can't. Mannequins wear bad prom dresses each spring. Hospital dummies wear nothing but drafty little gowns and skid-resistant socks. And a Giada-like grin. Plus many, many, vital sign monitoring devices.

So today, after years of successfully avoiding these things, I was sent to a virtual acute care simulation hospital full of "medically fragile" patients. Dummies. Patients. Both. Dummies. Damn.

We were told that this virtual experience was one of three available in the world, which is a true privilege. It's actually amazingly cool......allowing virgin healthcare clinicians to practice in a real-world setting that won't kill anybody. I respect that a great deal, and am thankful for the access to it. Except.....

Today we were to perform patient transfers from hospital bed to wheelchair, and all the pre-post stuff that comes with that. We were warned that in this high-tech simulation environment our "patients" would breath, react to what we were doing to them, maybe say a little something (oh. Sweet. Jesus.) So I was ready for real-life, squishy dummy-patients that look like Grandpa Joe.

You wanna know what happened?

My colleagues and I high-fived at the chance to be out of the lecture-world and into the ultimate lab. Then we hyperventilated. Then we divided to go solo, from room to room, with 10 minutes to complete the tasks for each dummy. But they were patients, with cardiac issues, and internal trauma, and oxygen tanks. And not one looked like Grandpa Joe. Instead, we manhandled 6-foot Ken dolls. I know you're wondering - they were not anatomically accurate.

So I washed my hands 39 times in 45 minutes, recorded vital signs, successfully switched Ken 3's oxygen from wall to portable oxygen but choked him on his heart rate monitor line, catapaulted Ken 2 to the point his heart rate plummeted to a concerning level (but, I maintained proper body mechanics), exposed the private parts (such as they are) of Ken 1 when I lost his Pulse-sock in his groin area. I didn't drop anyone, though, and Igot a thumbs-up from the professor after Ken 1. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure the observers for the other two Kens giggled the same way that the 911 operators did the day I got stuck in a remote Port-a-John. And, it was all videotaped for 'feedback' purposes (the dummies, not the port-a-john escape).

But weirdly, the last thing I wanted to do was run away from the creepy medically-fragile giant Ken dolls. I talked - okay, rambled - to them the whole time. I'm not sure why, but being in someone's very personal space at a very uncertain personal time feels better with a familiar soundtrack, even if it's your own not-so-certain voice.

Talking to a dummy. Who smiled at me. I swear.