There have been times when I find I need to be reminded of the “magic” of child life. No, child life specialists are not the magicians that wave a wand and magically transform a thrashing child into a perfectly still and poised princess. But the “magic of child life” are those moments when we are reminded of how seemingly simple aspects of our job can actually make an incredible impact on a child’s experience in the healthcare setting.
Today I want to share a “magical” moment as a way to remind us all of the impact medical play has on children. It is my hope that we are reminded of “magical” moments in child life to spur us towards continued creativity and commitment to child life values.
Little toy dinosaur figures are some of favorite go-to toys. There have been so many ways I have enjoyed incorporating them into my child life practice whether that be using them for pretend play to help a child quickly return to baseline or for an incentive dinosaur collection system.
For this particular day, I decided to use toy dinosaurs to work with a 5 year-old patient named “Steve” who had been having a very difficult time coping with his Erwinia injections. Ewinia is a type of medicine that can eliminate cancer cells and is injected deep in the muscle (ouch).
I first directed Steve to use chalk to mark “cancer cells” on the dinosaurs. Steve scribbled away on each dinosaur and chose to completely cover the dinosaurs in cancer cells. We talked about how Steve’s cancer isn’t on the outside like the dinosaurs, but that the goal of this activity is to help him understand what it could look like on the inside.
We talked about how there are different kinds of strong medicine (like chemotherapy and now Erwinia) that help get rid of cancer. Sometimes that medicine can be swallowed in a drink or chewable, sometimes it can go straight through the port, or in this case, it goes through a poke in the leg.
We then used various syringes and filled them with water and talked about how these syringes look very similar to the Erwinia injections the patient receives.
Now it was my time to “phase out” (meaning, allow the medical play session to be more child-directed). After I set the stage for how the dinosaurs have cancer cells and the syringes are filled with medicine to get rid of the cancer, then I sat back and let Steve start deciding what happened next.
He began by lining up each dinosaur in a row. He then would “call them back” very similarly to how the nurse comes around the corner of the waiting room and calls Steve for his turn to come back to his room.
Once in the imaginary room, the dinosaur had to “hold still” and Steve would quickly shoot the water out of the syringe over the “cancer cells” of chalk. He looked on with awe of how the chalk began to wash away with each push of the syringe.
He turned to me and said, “Oh! The shot is getting the cancer to wipe away! It’s just like me!”
Magic.
Medical play served as an impacting visual to help Steve cope with his injections because he gained the understanding and education of why this was a necessary part of his treatment. This somewhat simple medical play session became the pivotal moment for the Steve to experience a sense of mastery and control and led to Steve utilizing effective coping strategies for future injections.