Lucy Suggs' lessons include making the letter A into an alligator and learning about shapes, which coincided with a plate full of pancakes being delivered to her room.

It's just a normal school day at Batson Children's Hospital, and Lucy, a 3-year-old from Brandon, is learning about squares and triangles as her teacher cut the pancakes. Three sides or four?

Just like in any public school in the state, classes started in August in the Hospital School at the state's only children's hospital. In patient rooms and study areas and sometimes while getting treatments, patients work on lessons to keep learning while they're patients or not ready to return to the classroom.

Lucy's mom, Jeananne Suggs, loves that Lucy isn't missing a bit of preschool education while she's a patient. “I like it a lot,” she said. “Lucy gets to learn her letters and numbers and do an art project, and it's a nice break for me. And she loves the teachers.”

While world-class athletes and middle-class tourists alike are shunning countries ridden with the Zika virus, dozens of University of Mississippi Medical Center students, faculty and staff have not backed down.

In February, the World Health Organization declared the Zika virus' reach a global public-health emergency - yet nurses, dental and medical students, physicians, occupational therapists, pharmacists and others have continued to serve on medical missions to Haiti, Honduras, Peru, Nicaragua and other areas beset by outbreaks of the disease linked to paralysis and birth defects.

And many of them - including women of child-bearing age - plan to return, facing possible exposure to the mosquito-borne illness for which, so far, no cure has been found.

What they have found, instead, is a remedy for fear: the plight of the people they serve.

“Zika was definitely on people's minds,” said Logan Barlow, an RN and nurse-practitioner-in-training who traveled in May to Galette-Chambon, Haiti.

Several interesting events are scheduled for the upcoming week at the Medical Center.