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Kids can drive mini cars into surgery at this hospital, leaving their anxiety in the dust.

Kids can drive mini cars into surgery at this hospital, leaving their anxiety in the dust.

All good parents want their children to live happy and healthy lives. But for parents of sick kids, particularly those with chronic and congenital health conditions, that's a much more difficult goal to achieve.

Unsurprisingly, anxiety is ever-present in both these parents and kids' lives.

As a mother of two children with congenital health conditions, I know first-hand how scary it can be when you’re worried and trying to process the “what if” or expected eventuality of surgery.    


We also often worry about what it will mean when our children are old enough to process the risks of surgery. It’s difficult for any parent to see their child fearful or in a state of discomfort.

And surgery is much harder to explain to a child than small medical procedures like shots — the stakes are higher and the unknowns can make the process even more terrifying, especially for young kids.

In California, one hospital is doing what they can to make the idea of surgery less daunting by allowing kids to drive mini cars into the operating room.

At Doctors Medical Center in Modesto, California, they know that fun can be a great distraction from anxiety.

The innovative solution to reducing kids' discomfort came from pre-op nurse Kimberly Martinez after she read about the long-term impact cars have on young kids. To put her plan into action, they let kids choose between a mini pink Volkswagen Beetle and a Black Mercedes.

So far, the results have been awesome (and adorable).  

“When the children find out they can go into the operating room riding in a cool little car, they light up, and in most cases, their fears melt away,” the hospital wrote in a statement to PEOPLE. “In addition, when parents see their children put at ease, it puts them at ease as well.”

Once the video started to go viral, folks in the social media world expressed their gratefulness for the opportunity to see something so positive vrooming down their timelines.

Doctors Medical Center is far from the only medical facility taking steps to reduce children's anxiety. A number of resources are dedicated to helping children headed to surgery, as well as their parents, however, sometimes adding a reading list to an already addled family isn't a practical solution.

Many of these parents are so busy and stressed they simply can't make the time to do socio-emotional research on reducing anxiety on top of learning about their children's health conditions.

Innovative programs like that at Doctors Medical Center take one more thing off parent's plates and make what can be a tense experience go more smoothly for everyone.

Other hospitals are catching on, too. It's why Sheffield Children’s Hospital offers it's kid patients their own sweet ride into surgery.

The more medical facilities that utilize creative solutions like this to easy young patients and their families' anxieties the better. Here's hoping we see many more fun, innovative ideas sprouting up in hospitals all over the country.

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Dogs are naturally driven by a sense of purpose and a need for belonging, which are all part of their instinctual pack behavior. When a dog has a job to do, it taps into its needs for structure, purpose, and the feeling of contributing to its pack, which in a domestic setting translates to its human family.

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Joy

Kudos to the heroes who had 90 seconds to save lives in the Key Bridge collapse

The loss of 6 lives is tragic, but the dispatch recording shows it could have been so much worse.

Representative image by Gustavo Fring/Pexels

The workers who responded to the Dali's mayday call saved lives with their quick response.

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Yale's pep band had to miss the NCAA tournament. University of Idaho said, 'We got you.'

In an act of true sportsmanship, the Vandal band learned Yale's fight song, wore their gear and cheered them on.

Courtesy of University of Idaho

The Idaho Vandals answered the call when Yale needed a pep band.

Yale University and the University of Idaho could not be more different. Ivy League vs. state school. East Coast vs. Pacific Northwest. City vs. farm town. But in the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, extenuating circumstances brought them together as one, with the Bulldogs and the Vandals becoming the "Vandogs" for a weekend.

When Yale made it to the March Madness tournament, members of the school's pep band had already committed to other travel plans during spring break. They couldn't gather enough members to make the trek across the country to Spokane, Washington, so the Yale Bulldogs were left without their fight song unless other arrangements could be made.

When University of Idaho athletic band director Spencer Martin got wind of the need less than a week before Yale's game against Auburn, he sent out a message to his band members asking if anyone would be interested in stepping in. The response was a wave of immediate yeses, so Martin got to work arranging instruments and the students dedicated themselves to learning Yale's fight song and other traditional Yale pep songs.

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Unfortunately, because of the misinformation from the anti-vaccination movement, some of these diseases have trended up in a really bad way over the past several years.

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There's no better example of that than a 2016 discovery at the University of California, Irvine, by doctoral student Mya Le Thai. After playing around in the lab, she made a discovery that could lead to a rechargeable battery that could last up to 400 years. That means longer-lasting laptops and smartphones and fewer lithium ion batteries piling up in landfills.

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