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Hello my name is Anne Meng, I'm a pediatric nurse practitioner and clinical
nurse specialist
and I'm the leader of the team that created
Radical Randy
Radical Randy is an outcome of our work with children with asthma and it's designed to
help the children understand the changes that happen in their airway
when they have an asthma attack
and we use it to motivate them to take care of themselves, using their daily controller medication
to keep their lungs healthy.
The doll is also animated in our DVD.
I've used the doll both
with groups of children, about six to eight at the most,
and also I've used it
individually in a clinic setting to educate a child with their parent.
It is a nice introduction in clinic, because we have the manikin
sitting in our office and the children usually are drawn to it
and say, "What is that; can you show me what that doll is?
And we introduce the doll as Radical Randy. He's a special doll.
His chest opens to show you what happens during an asthma attack.
So this is how he works.
We open up the chest,
and the top part of his chest can actually come off,
and then we can show the children the ribs. We can discuss "retracting" with parents.
Then we open up the
right side and we tell children and the parents that
if Randy's chest could open, this is what it might look like.
The lungs don't really open, but if they did, this is what they might see.
And we talk about the airway. We can talk about the airway beginning at the nose and
going down to their trachea, and that they can feel that in their neck
and that it feels kind of like the rings on the slinky toy.
And then we show them how
the trachea divides into the right and left bronchi and
goes into smaller and smaller and smaller branches
kind of like an upside down
broccoli and that
the tiny, tiny branches, which are called bronchioles,
are where asthma happens.
And then we take a magnifying glass,
and we tell the children and the parents, "Look
if we could magnify these tiny, tiny bronchioles, many, many times
this is what they might look like.",
And we pull out this little tube
and we show the children
this tube represents what your airways look like when you're feeling good
and we can actually look through it and look at the children
and they can see that they can see right through the tube.
And then we ask them to hold their hand out while we blow.
And we validate with them that they can feel air moving through the airway.
We show them
these little boondogles that encircle the little bronchiole and
explain that these are smooth muscles and show them how we can
put our finger under it, because they are loose and relaxed.
And the relaxness of these smooth muscles helps keep the airway open.
Then we explain to the children that
Radical Randy has been invited to his friend's house for an overnight
and his friend
has cats.
But Randy is allergic to cats
and pretty soon he starts
to not feel very good. He is feeling anxious.
We can see it in his face.
He's anxious because his chest is hurting.
Let's see what his chest looks like so we open up the other side.
You can see it right away.
The left side of Randy's chest is bright red
and that means inflammation
and the smooth muscles that go around his bronchioles are tight.
It's kind of like you're choking the airway.
Let's see what is happening in the small bronchioles.
Let's magnify them and we pull out our second tube
and we tell
the children and the parents
now this is what happens
when you are having an asthma attack.
We can control the inflation with this blood pressure like device
here
we can lock it.
The best thing of all is our green artificial mucus.
You can take some mucus
and actually put it in the airway.
We can show the children "look.
we can't see you like we could through other airway".
"Look at these smooth muscles, they are tight."
"Look at the mucus inside the airway."
"Can Randy breath like this?" The children identify "no". We summarize there are
three things that happen during an asthma attack:
swelling,
tight muscles and mucus.
And then we talk about okay,
what can you do to keep your lungs from looking like this
and keep them open like this and feeling good?
And so we go into a discussion of how important it
is to use your everyday controller medications.
So that's basically how we use Radical Randy.
It's an adjunct to the film
and I sometimes will show Lesson 1 on the DVD
which is called "What Is Asthma?"
and then I will back it up with a discussion of what's happening in the
lungs. Having them touch and feel and use that multisensory teaching approach with Radical Randy