Las Vegas City Wire

A University of Nevada, Las Vegas, medical school alum entertains pediatric hospital patients by volunteering for a local nonprofit.

Dr. Alex Ma, a second-year family medicine resident at Valley Health System, cheers up children by dressing up as superheroes for Critical Care Comics, according to UNLV News Center.

“In residency, you have even less free time than the limited time that we have in medical school, so it's easy to get complacent and not want to do anything in residency, let alone community-based activities," Ma told UNLV News Center. "I find that volunteering keeps me engaged; it really makes me go out and interact with people. It's something that I try to do at least once a month, sometimes multiple times per month. It really lets me have an opportunity to express myself in a way that I really don't get to on a daily basis.”

He connected with Critical Care Comics "the same way that I connect with a lot of things; it was kind of an accident," he said, according to UNLV News Center.

Ma worked in a nearby hospital as a third-year medical student at Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine in 2019, encountering a lot of “superheroes.” As a lifelong comic book fan, Ma reached out to Critical Care Comics to see if he could help in their mission.

He chose to be Miles Morales, a version of Spider-Man from the 2018 film "Into the Spider-Verse," which he finds engages patients who also share his passion for comic books.