OGDEN — Zeke SimMan almost had a very bad Tuesday. He went to the dental hygiene clinic at Weber State University, where he suffered a heart attack and had to be rushed by paramedics to the "hospital," where he was hooked up to all kinds of monitors that showed his heart was too fast, his oxygen saturation too low, his breathing too erratic. And he was dizzy.

Lucky, for SimMan, he was made of rubber and plastic and wires, or he'd probably have been sweaty and pale, as well.

Ted Aiken gave him Versed, a sedative to help relax him, so that Jason Close could intubate him. By that time, he was in ventricular tachycardia, failing fast. Jean Wingate and Aimee Snyder tried to shock his heart back into a normal rhythm, and Aiken gave him succinylcholine. Still a crisis. So Snyder started CPR, counting and pushing on his chest, pausing at each 30 count so Close could give him a couple of breaths of air. Then they shocked him again, and this time, SimMan's heart slipped into a normal sinus rhythm.

Welcome to the newly updated Dumke Interdisciplinary Simulation Lab at Weber State, where students earning degrees in emergency care and rescue, nursing and respiratory therapy get a chance to face medical emergencies in an environment where wrong choices are a learning experience, not life-and-death. Tuesday, during an open house, members of the public saw the students run through their paces.

In the corner, respiratory therapy faculty member Lisa Trujillo worked on SimBaby, a lifelike baby simulator that was having some health issues of her own.

In a room enclosed behind one-way glass, a computer and its programs responded to each treatment step taken by nursing students Wingate, Snyder and Aiken and respiratory therapy student Close. Make a good decision and SimMan starts to improve. Do something wrong and he might flat-line.

It is from the control room that instructors can select preprogrammed scenarios or enter their own to replicate an array of ailments that the students are likely to encounter in clinical practice, with flesh-and-blood patients. The simulations can also be recorded and edited for broadcast over the Web or for podcasts so students can learn from them over and over.

WSU recently put more than a half-million dollars into equipment and resources to update the lab, which Allen Hanberg, assistant nursing professor who teaches critical care, hailed as the finest in the state and perhaps the entire Intermountain West.

It's not easy, he said, for instructors to sit back silently and let students make what in real life could be deadly mistakes. But it's an important part of the learning process.

And when students begin working in critical care settings as part of their education, they're ready, thanks to the fact that SimMan has many health problems, often many times a week.

The lab, Trujillo added, also builds teamwork. They talk about the need to collaborate in class, but it is in a clinical situation, even a fake one, that they actually have to pull together.

All the different nursing, respiratory therapy and emergency medical classes work in the simulation lab at some point.

The first time Wingate treated SimMan, she said, it was all adrenaline and panic. "It was scary. I never worked in critical care, so it was easy to not know what to do."

A few simulations later, she — and her patient — are doing fine.

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E-mail: lois@desnews.com