HealthNotes

The Gaumard simulators are highly sophisticated, providing a very lifelike experience that allows Eisenhower's clinical staff to learn high-risk procedures in a low-risk environment. “It's about sharpening essential critical thinking skills,” says Solomon Sebt, MD, Medical Director of the John Stauffer Center for Innovation in Learning, Eisenhower Health. “The manikins can make voice commands, perform functions that simulate real-life emergent medical conditions, sweat, bleed, cry, urinate, and use artificial intelligence to converse with learners in real-time using genuine responses.”

“We want these simulations to mimic how it is on a hospital unit, so participants can receive the best training possible, and our patients continue to receive the safest, highest standard of care,” notes Dr. Sebt.

When Maria “Lupe” Ayuso learned she needed spinal surgery to relieve the back pain she had endured for a decade, she didn’t have to research who she wanted to perform the intricate operation. 

She knew it would be the same neurosurgeon who undertook two successful back surgeries for her mother nearly 15 years earlier — Alfred Shen, MD, a Board Certified Neurosurgeon with Eisenhower Neuroscience Institute. 

“He was so personable and attentive,” she recalls. “And my mother’s surgeries went very well.” (Her mother agrees.) Ayuso told Dr. Shen in 2005, “If I ever injure my back and need an operation, you are the only one I want to do my surgery.” 

A decade before that prophetic sentence, Ayuso, an experienced medical admissions clerk, accompanied her sister to her job at Eisenhower Health. Ayuso left with a new position of her own in the Admitting Department. She later became office secretary to Lee Erlendson, MD, Board Certified in Anesthesiology and Pain Management. 

The first signs of pain
In 2008, Ayuso began experiencing pain in her lower back but brushed it off. An active walker, she typically logged up to seven miles a day. She also enjoyed lifting weights at her local gym. Somehow, during that time, she injured her back.

“I still don’t know how it happened,” says Ayuso. She only knows the pain kept getting worse. Under Dr. Erlendson’s watchful eye, she tried anti-inflammatories and pain medications, including steroid injections.

If you look up the word “resilience” in the dictionary, you just might find a picture of Mary Beth Brockman. 

The 79-year-old La Quinta resident has withstood multiple health challenges in her lifetime, including Type 1 diabetes, Addison’s disease (a rare, life-threatening condition in which the adrenal glands make too little of the hormone cortisol), uterine cancer, irritable bowel syndrome and asthma.

As if that weren’t enough, she and her husband of 56 years caught COVID-19 before the vaccine became available. He died of complications from the virus in January 2021.

Yet Brockman is still standing, despite an asthma flare-up that caused acute hypoxic respiratory failure, landing her at Eisenhower Medical Center for three days last March. Thanks to her being a self-described “very compliant patient” since her asthma diagnosis in 2011, it was the first time that her asthma required her to be hospitalized.

What happened?