He gives them superhero costumes to wear on the way to surgery so they aren't afraid to leave their parents behind.
Dr. Leandro Brandão shared a video on Instagram that became wildly popular. The images reveal what he does to get his little patients into the operating room without it being traumatic: He dresses them all up in superhero costumes.
In this video we can see their enthusiasm – and the delightful reaction on the faces of the doctors and nurses he and the children pass on the way:
The idea
Dr. Leandro Brandão has been an otolaryngologist for 14 years. He currently works in the city of Divinópolis in the state of Minas Gerais (southeastern Brazil). He specialized in pediatric surgery, and since the beginning of his career something bothered him: having to take children out of their parents’ arms to take them to the operating room.
In a conversation with Aleteia, he told us that he’d already tested several ways to make this moment less difficult, but he wasn’t always successful.
Then he had an idea: to offer superhero costumes to patients who were going to undergo an operation. “I searched the internet and found a person who made the costumes at an affordable price so that I could buy them and give them to the children, without having to ask for them back later. So that helped me a lot and helped the patients to get in on the fun,” explains the doctor.
Going to the surgical ward
Before being sedated, the child patients get capes and costumes of world-renowned characters. For a moment, the playful costume substitutes that cold and frightening surgical gown.
The doctor explains that he invites the children to make believe they are superheroes, and thus, they go running or “flying” (with the doctor carrying them horizontally on his shoulder) into the operating room. “I tell them that we’ll go in to blow up a balloon, to play, that we’ll go in wearing a costume, running, flying, however they want … And this way, they enter the surgical ward smiling!”
And how do their parents react? “The parents stay outside, amazed at the way the child goes in. They don’t suffer so much and they don’t think that they’re letting their most precious treasure be taken away,” replies the doctor.