From Hospital Playrooms to Game Nights: How a Child Life Specialist Connects Work and Extra Life
Inside a Child Life Specialist’s Role in Detroit
At Corewell Health Children’s Hospital, play and gaming are part of how children experience comfort and connection during a hospital stay. We asked a child life specialist and Extra Life participant about how their work and fundraising come together.
Tell us about yourself and your role at the hospital.
I am a child life specialist at Corewell Health Children’s Hospital. My job helps mitigate the stressful effects of hospitalization for children and their families, and I am privileged to be allowed to support them through difficult moments. The best part of my job is being able to individualize my care for every child, and help each of them feel heard. I make sure that kids in the hospital know that they can be scared, sad and brave at the same time, and that being in the hospital does not mean that they can’t also still have fun and feel like kids. Every day, I see firsthand the positive impact of play on the wellbeing of a hospitalized child. I use play and gaming to help normalize the hospital environment as well as achieve understanding, positive coping and other therapeutic goals.
How did you start participating in Extra Life? What motivates you to continue each year?
A few years ago, I started to get more interested in the therapeutic aspects of video games and connected with some gaming technology specialists in bigger children’s hospitals on how to potentially implement therapeutic gaming into a smaller child life program like the one at my hospital. I became involved with Extra Life through that, and in doing so found an amazing community that supports the work that I do from behind the scenes. I am incredibly passionate about Extra Life because I know firsthand what an impact the donations from the community have on children in the hospital.
What do you do to fundraise for Extra Life?
Some of my fundraising is focused around the traditional way of doing it in Extra Life – streaming on Twitch, usually doing speedruns or community streams with friends. Together with the Detroit Extra Life guild, we are also partnering with local college expos and anime conventions to help raise money and awareness. My game day, however, is a tabletop game night at a local brewery in the spring. Most people on the pediatric team know that I fundraise for Children’s Miracle Network through Extra Life, and they show their support of those efforts during that event. In addition to the work that we already do to help kids every day, fundraising for the programs and treatments that support their care adds an extra layer of depth for the desire of helping children that drove most of us into pediatrics in the first place. It is a great way to bring together the hospital staff and the Extra Life community as we all have the same goal of helping all kids.
How have you been involved with the broader Extra Life Detroit community?
Together with the Detroit Extra Life guild, we are also partnering with local college expos and anime conventions to help raise money and awareness.
What value does participating in Extra Life add to your role as a hospital employee?
Being a child life specialist and an extra lifer gives me a unique perspective, and both of these roles inform the other. Sharing about my work while talking about Extra Life and asking people to consider a donation is as natural as sharing fundraising wins with my team and cheering for the kids in my community. Not only does this all fuel my personal drive in continuing to fundraise, but sharing direct results of the fundraising is a touch of positivity and goodness that I think people want to see in the world. Coming to work every day and supporting some of the sickest patients, and then going home and fundraising to continue to help them and so many others that I will not ever meet brings me a sense of purpose and so much joy. I hope that other hospital employees who love gaming join me in these fundraising efforts, because it truly helps me feel like I am a part of something bigger, and that I can impact the lives of kids far beyond my immediate reach.
