When 9-year-old Tess Baird landed at Sick Kids for surgery on a badly broken finger she was terrified.

“The big lights, all the big machines. I was really scared,” she said.

To put her mind at ease, hospital staff gave her a virtual reality headset — futuristic-looking goggles with a 360-degree video screen — that detailed the impending procedure from a patient’s perspective.

The frightened Brampton girl experienced a blow by blow of what to expect from the moment she’d be greeted by nursing staff, to being wheeled through the halls on a gurney, receiving anesthetic and falling into a fog, to finally waking up when it was over.

When she underwent the surgery 30 minutes later, she was no longer scared.

“Let’s say I had 10 nerves. Nine of them were gone,” said Tess, who broke her finger while roughhousing with her teenage brother Mitch.

Virtual reality isn’t just for gamers anymore. Toronto anesthesiologists Fahad Alam and Clyde Matava are using immersive reality in health care in the only such lab in Canada called the Collaborative Human Immersive and Interactive Lab (CHISIL).

They have tested the technology on more than 200 patients including Tess at The Hospital for Sick Children and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. “We’re taking (VR) out of the gaming realm, and actually using it to help patients and changing care,” said Alam. With the immersive experience, “the fear of unknown is kind of eliminated.”

They doctors are now analyzing the data and the results have been encouraging. There have been no episodes of “VR sickness” (headaches and nausea similar to motion sickness) and any fear prior to surgery has decreased. They found that nearly all the children at Sick Kids preferred the VR over traditional PowerPoint slides to explain the surgery process.

One hundred parents of patients, including Tess’s mom Kristen Wall, also tried the technology.

“There’s nothing more frightening as a parent than having one of your children sick or broken,” said Wall, who found it eased her nerves as well.

“I watched (Tess) go from nervous and frightened to more armed with information.”

Preoperative anxiety doesn’t just affect children. It is a significant problem across all age brackets.

“Up to 80 per cent of patients coming for any type of surgery can be suffering from some form of preoperation anxiety,” said Alam. That anxiety can result in pain and increased anesthetic requirements in the operating room.

The unease doesn’t just dissipate after surgery, it can delay recovery. “Anxiety exists up to three weeks afterwards,” said Matava. For children, this often can be what the doctors call “post-hospital negative behaviours” including bed wetting, loss of sleep, missed school and not eating well.

The VR could replace current less effective methods of stress relief including cartoon drawings, photographs and standard 2D video by allowing patients to “preexperience the environment” in a gamelike way.

For Toronto resident Laura Victoria-Perez, 41, who suffers from social anxiety, the presurgery virtual reality experience was ideal.

“It feels like you’re inside a video game,” said Victoria-Perez, who had surgery in November. “If at my age I was afraid, I can only imagine how it scares some kids before a surgery.”

Virtual reality is most often associated with pricey brands like Occulus Rift and PlayStation VR, which cost upwards of $500. At Toronto’s CHISIL lab, Matava and Alam have kept their costs in check using Google Cardboard, which is mounted to a smartphone rather than using its own screen. At $5-$15 per headset it is among the most inexpensive of VR options.

The technology is increasingly being used in various fields such as journalism (watch a scared Star reporter ride a rollercoaster), education, religion, and museums. In sport, the related idea of visualization — imagining a successful goal, taking your mind through strokes of the paddle to victory — has been around since the early ’80s, said Olympian rower Silken Laumann. She partnered with Samsung for the #BeFearless campaign to help participants face fears including public speaking using a Samsung VR headset.

“As athletes we’ve used visualization for decades to imagine a scenario and learn to cope with that scenario,” she said. “The unconscious mind can’t really discern between an imagined experience and a real experience. Imagining something over and over again is like doing it.”

The Sick Kids and Sunnybrook doctors hope that the technology will also be helpful for training health workers. They’ve tried the VR in instruction for putting a scope down a virtual patient’s airway and for simpler tasks such as setting up an operating room.

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Patients in Matava and Alam’s Toronto hospitals may soon have menus of 50 to 100 immersive experiences accessible at home with their own Google Cardboard headset, which they keep after using at the hospital. Patients can already download an app for Sick Kids on the App Store called ChildLife VR. These will allow pre-op patients to do such things as navigate the halls of Sunnybrook, see what it’s like to get a nerve block for pain management, get an epidural, or simply where to park the car.

The purpose of each VR video is to lower a patient’s anxiety and fear. For Tess, the virtual reality prelude was a success.

“Don’t worry,” is her post-op advice. “It’s not going to be as scary as you think.”