It's a funny old job, being a Medical Education Technician. Butchering meat, driving robots, making fake wounds, and just occasionally, mutilating and rebuilding soft toys. Well it's International Teddy Bear Day tomorrow, apparently, so why not have a soft toy-themed post, even if a slightly grim one?
So two parts to this one- first, a project for the "Managing Patients Who Pose A Risk" course. I mentioned in a previous post making various fake sharps, knives and things, for the faculty to wave-about whilst pretending to be armed patients.
Another scenario we were prepping for was a scenario where an emotionally-distressed teenager destroyed her teddy on a ward, upsetting some other patients. Now we could go down the road of just giving the faculty a teddybear to destroy, but it takes quite a lot of effort to pull a toy to bits, and I didn't want a scenario derailed because the faculty were dancing about the place trying to do the deed. Likewise, I didn't want to spend hours stitching teddies back together for re-use.
The solution? Making a teddy that could be easily dismantled, and rebuilt.
I used a jointed teddybear, for ease. Well, there was one in the props box, so it made sense to upcycle it for this (and I've been asked to downsize the props we keep for the fake kids ward anyway). Being rather battered, this bear would have been probably heading for material recycling anyway rather than a charity shop.
Cutting the bear open to expose the joints. After talking it through with a colleague, we reasoned on a detachable head and leg, to give the best effect. The metal bars for the joints pinned two discs of wood, the bar held in place with a metal collar.
Trimming the collar allowed the metalwork to be removed, leaving just the wooden discs.
They were then hot-glued in place, and the fur fabric trimmed a little to reveal more of the discs.
We had some of those picture-hanging Command Strips in the spares box, and they were hot-glued onto the discs in the body. Regular fluffy Velcro, salvaged from an ancient robot skin that had long-ago been replaced, was used for the head and the limb. The bond is nice and strong, and detaches with a loud ripping sound.
A yellow patch was sewn onto the rippable leg to differentiate it, and the original ribbon was put back to disguise the neck a little.
So, a bear that's endlessly damageable, but goes back together nicely. But not the first cuddly toy that's been cut to bits in the name of Medical Education, for that we need to take a trip to the (simulated) Kids Ward.
Hallie (Robot Girl From The Future!), our Paediatric simulator. Given our budget of Nowt for most things, we rely for almost all our decorative props on donations and hand-me-downs, which has included a vast menagerie of cuddly toys. Useful for simulating the kids bedrooms and children's wards, anyway, in large numbers.
One such item, a handily large teddy, was this unicorn/pegasus (an alicorn, I am informed by my My-Little-Pony-mad youngest). By their nature, the kids courses tend to induce staff and patients to speak very softly, which means having lots of extra microphones close at hand, concealed around the place so as to not distract, and big teddies make it easier to hide the audio-visual gear.
However- it had clearly been a cheap and nasty fairground prize, and was stuffed with nasty little foam beads. Which was also a problem because it was forever ripping or suffering seam-splits, and leaking everywhere. After the fourth or fifth time I'd spent ages picking up beads, I thought something needed to be done, possibly involving a blowtorch.
Still, it was too useful to hide A/V gear, and equally the big cute toy did have a habit of tugging at the heart-strings and making the candidates realistically emotional when supporting an ill child, so time to kill two birds with one stone. Or one Alicorn with a scalpel, at least. Plus, just in case A.I goes self-aware, angering the robot child by destroying her plushie might lead to the robot apocalypse...
Dear heavens, those beads went everywhere. Gutting the thing meant more mess than even I'd anticipated. Finally done, the toy was turned inside-out.
Some plastic tubing was upcycled from a dead set of pipes off the anaesthetic machine, and some foam circles from the spares box.
The toys seams were reinforced to stop it ripping any more, then the pony re-filled with regular stuffing (upcycled from cheap cushions).
The plastic pipe ran from the base of the horn, to the back leg. Well it felt a little weird to have it coming out the logical place, which would have been it's backside. The microphone on its cable was fed through the hoof, up the pipe, and into the base of the horn. A bit trickier than I'd intended, as the pipe going to the leg has a couple of kinks in it, and it would be easier with a bigger diameter pipe, but budget-less beggars couldn't be choosers. A string is fed from the horn down through the pipe out the leg, attached to the microphone, then pulled back through.
And there's the mic, nicely concealed. And the pony acts as its own muffler for the sound too, like those fluffy things they bung on professional microphones.
And there we are, the prototype microphone-hiding-pony, though still with the string used to pull the mic up through the toy in place in this shot. The mic is nicely inconspicuous in practise; however, the pipe I'd used was a little on the snug side, which made it a problem pulling the mic through, with the various kinks and twists in it.
This summer however, we got donated some out-of-date pipework from an old anaesthetic machine (unused, still sealed in packet, so no germs). The pipe was rather wider-bore, so the pony returned to surgery...
Much better- the mic goes through a lot easier now.
Quite inconspicuous in practise.
When we do the Martin House courses, we run scenarios at the same time in the Ward and Resus, so it would be handy to have two of these plush microphone stands. This rather nice bear had been donated to us; it's quite large, and there was some pressure from the higher-tiers at the job to downsize the tat we keep as props. Of course, one way around that was to make the toys useful and give them a secondary purpose, so teddy here also went under the knife...
As it happened, the teddy already had a couple of split seams, and came apart worryingly easily.
Same trick with the pipe- foam 'collars' at each end, hot-glued into the paw at one end, and the head at the other.
So there we are; unwanted, broken old toys that would otherwise have been headed to landfill (or more accurately the hospitals incinerator) that have been necessarily-mutilated but put to excellent use in the name of medical education. Junk to valued pieces of equipment for simulation. Happy Teddy Day I suppose, though unlikely to make the plot of the next Toy Story film I suspect...
