Camille Decuir and her lab partner were practicing giving one another ultrasounds during a unit on the thyroid when they both saw something abnormal on the screen. There, in black and white, was a large nodule on Decuir’s thyroid.

Thyroid nodules are not uncommon for women, Decuir said, and she assumed the post-operation lab results would show that it was benign. But, that was not that case. The mass of cells was cancerous.

“We all expected ourselves to be normal, so it’s good to find, but scary at the same time,” she said, noting that another student found a benign tumor on their liver. “I did think, ‘What if I had never been in this program?’ because I might not have known for many years.”

Now, Decuir is cancer-free and continuing her studies to become a vascular ultrasound technician, with the knowledge of what it’s like to be the patient and with help from the new machines at Bellevue College’s new diagnostic ultrasound educational facility.

The ultrasound laboratory is one of the many new facilities that recently opened to prepare Bellevue College health sciences students for the next phase in their careers with as close to real-life experience as they can get in a classroom.

Bellevue College opened the doors on Oct. 22 to the new Health Sciences, Education and Wellness T-Building, a 70,000-square-foot facility featuring laboratories and learning spaces integrated into one area.

Prior to the new building, students from the different disciplines were separated, as were different types of facilities. Now, nursing students can practice the full-range of patient care, including transporting their dummy “patients” on a gurney to X-ray machines and other technology for diagnosis.

In one location, students can study alcohol and drug counseling, radiation technology, diagnostic ultrasound, nuclear medicine technology, early learning and teacher education, nursing and more.

There are two dedicated skills labs with 20 hospital beds, a five-room medical simulation lab, two radiology labs with X-ray machines and separate labs for radiation therapy, nuclear medicine technology and phlebotomy.

Many of the facilities mirror a professional hospital setting. “This kind of sets in that professional feeling. That’s the big thing for me,” said student Kayla Henderson.

Bellevue College broke ground on the building in the summer of 2013 and completed it near the end of this summer. It was also constructed with sustainability in mind, meeting LEED Gold standards and incorporating environmentally sustainable features, such as a vegetation-covered living roof, the use of recycled building materials and geothermal heating.

The building is now open to health sciences students.