Feeding group and leadership

Feeding group was really interesting! I’ll try to post on that tonight. For now I’m headed out to volunteer and run some errands before I meet my friend and start the second part of the day. If I stay home I’ll be tempted to nap since I didn’t manage to fall asleep until like 3am! Ack ick! And I saw one of my professors today! The clock ticks down, only 6 more days before school starts!!

For now I’ll leave you with a concept I’ve thought about a lot over the past semester. It was in a book about leadership, in one of our OT books. The gist of it was “Good leaders make other leaders, not followers.”

More later.

Quick update: I tried skimming through one of my books but couldn’t find the exact quote. I think about this quote a lot because I realized that when I am in a group project, I often tend to manage it in such a way that I make the others dependent on me. That is actually true in a lot of aspects of my life. It’s kind of like the give a man fish and he eats for a day, teach him how to fish and he eats forever, kind of thing. I tend to just “give out the fish” because it’s often easier and quicker to do so. Gotta work on that!

HIPAA Therapy

It would be more fun if this post was about hippotherapy.

It’s 1:20am and I went to bed hours ago. But I tossed and turned and then suddenly a thought occurred to me: what if I have violated HIPAA in some way, even though I have been careful since Day 1? I would be in so much trouble. I mean, I had changed names and details and everything, but maybe I hadn’t been vague enough! My mind raced.

I got up and turned on my computer and went back to the few posts I had made that involved patient stories. Even though I’m pretty confident they were edited enough to be more than safe, I made them even vaguer and literally changed the entire story-lines so that only the moral lesson remained intact. And therefore the stories became a lot more boring. I think most people like to read specifics, and it is incredibly frustrating to change my painstakingly detailed journal entries of student-experience into soul-less tidbits devoid of personality.

The reasons behind HIPAA are obviously very important. I totally respect that. It’s just hard to figure out how to share experiences with others without crossing any lines.

I guess I need to figure out how to use fake specifics without people thinking I am violating HIPAA. I read a lot of blogs written by medical-field people and it seems like they all go through waves of paranoia where they worry about somehow violating HIPAA or thinking their employers are going to punish them if they find them. Several of them have been sued or fired. They live in fear. I don’t want that. It seems like some of them get around the issue by using specifics in their stories, but then using a site disclaimer saying everything they write is fiction, based on composite characters they’ve encountered in their career. Of course, as a new student, I can’t really draw on a huge pool of patient stories.

But hypothetically, it seems like the bloggers could say, Oh this is fiction, don’t mind me HIPAA…and then blithely write just the exact details of what went on, gambling that there is no chance of their patient ever stumbling across that blog and therefore never being reported. I wonder how many bloggers do that.

I guess it would be safest if I just continue what I am doing. Which is making things really overtly vague, or occasionally telling a story using made-up details that still allows me to reach the same conclusion in my learning. But that isn’t much fun.

I guess I need some HIPAA therapy.

Hanging with classmates & the reason I'm not in philosophy school

All names used with permission!

Today I met Brooke (OTS) at school so we could drop off some paperwork in preparation for beginning classes next week. Then I picked up Virginia (OTS) and we headed to Brooke’s house to go to lunch and go swimming at her apartment’s pool. Afterwards, we played online and hung out. It was really fun. Tomorrow Brooke & I are going to help document feeding behaviors for a feeding group at a local children’s hospital, then print out a bunch of syllabi for our upcoming classes in the computer lab. THEN we are headed to Virginia’s birthday lunch which will be composed entirely of OT girls! We aren’t even in school and we can’t stay away from each other! After that I’m probably going to go do my monthly volunteer shift at another hospital (primarily database entry for Rehab). And then I’m meeting a friend for dinner and to play a really bad game of tennis before I start my late-night work shift. Should be a busy but fun day.

I really like the idea of getting to spend quality time with some of my in-town classmates this week, and I can’t even remember what I used to do before they were in my life! I really like that we can all be like-minded in our pursuit of a healing profession like OT, yet have diverse interests within the field. Brooke is really fascinated at the idea of working with people who have eating disorders, and she also wants to do a fieldwork in England! (Hey all you UK bloggers, any ideas on good placements?!) Virginia is really interested in community OT, with particular interest and compassion for the homeless. And I’m primarily interested in pediatrics (but not school-based), but mental health & hands appeal to me on some level as well. I know some girls in my class already swear they want to work with geriatrics. Others swear they want to go into hands. Or physical dysfunction. We are all trying to keep an open mind, but I think we all definitely have some personality traits that endear us to certain populations. One of my favorite things about OT as a profession is that there is this “confined diversity”.

So…how to explain my concept of confined diversity. Ok. A lot of people go to school a long time and get a degree at a graduate level, but then STILL have no idea what they are going to do with their degree (like almost any liberal arts-related degree). Getting a Master’s in OT is a little different though – we know we’re almost certainly going to be occupational therapists. There isn’t so much fear in graduation because our outcome is a little bit more specific. Yet it’s not stifling to know we have one profession in mind, because we have a trillion different populations to choose from within that profession, covering the entire spectrum of human life. Too much freedom can be intimidating, yet too little freedom induces claustrophobia. OT gives us the best of both worlds!

There’s my rather shallow philosophical thought for the night. What can I say, I’m not Karen Kierkegaard…
(although,umthepictureIincludedisofaswirling
vortexmarblemymomhadinCaliforniaandIthinkitsreallylike,
Idontknow,deepofmetoincludethisparticularpicturewiththis
postitjustseemssofittingbutitsbeatingadeadhorsewithastick
towriteaboutwhyIpickedthispicturewhichiswhyImdoingitlikethis
becauseitskindalikesublimalandsoyouneverreadthisright).

Ahem. Good night.

Mohawks and Henna: Ideas for treating cancer with fun

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to decide on an OT-related thing to write about today. It’s hard to think of things after being out of school a month. I thought briefly about writing about my experience watching pediatric burn care, or sharing a really bad poem I wrote about grief, or maybe digging up another story from fieldwork. But I’m not feeling inspired. So I’ll tell you something that does inspire me.

My mom was diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer a few years ago. She decided to undergo chemotherapy and radiation, which is obviously not fun. But she did it with humor. When her hair started to fall out from the chemotherapy, she went and got a rainbow mohawk. She kept it in a day or two and then shaved it off. And then once she was completely bald, she got a henna artist to come to her house. The henna artist tatooed her scalp using Mom’s original designs, and then added glitter and gems. It was beautiful.

Luckily her treatment was successful. It’s now been several years and there is no sign of the cancer. I am so grateful to have her and I am so proud of how she handled her treatments! I think it would be great if more cancer patients could embrace the idea of having a little fun with their cancer journey.

When my mom is handed lemons in life, she doesn’t make lemonade, she makes lemonart! (I spent like ten minutes trying to think of a clever lemon pun, but totally never managed it. I’m giving up.) Hope you like the the pictures!!

Hodgepodge of thoughts

I just got back into town a few hours ago, and my landlords handed me my 3 weeks worth of mail. Right on top was the newest OT Practice, June 25th edition, and my blog did make it in! Yay! I’m excited! If anyone wants to submit a guest entry, e-mail your post to the address listed in the header paragraph. I’ve spent most of my June break in California and then a few days visiting friends in Nashville, so please forgive me for the disjointed blog entries I’ve had this month. I start back in school in another week and hopefully things will smooth out then.

A random oddity…I told a woman at the airport with me that I was in occupational therapy school, since we were making idle chit-chat while waiting to board. She said oh yes, I’ve read a book about the pioneer of OT! I asked incredulously, you mean the book about Ora Ruggles called the Healing Heart? She said yes. I was shocked. I don’t think I’ve met a single person yet who has read that book besides me (which is like the best book ever, but out of print and obscure and hard to find). She is a 68 year-old retiree from a little town in Tennessee. What a bizarre coincidence that she has read that book too.

The friend I’ve been staying with the last few days in Nashville just had rotator cuff surgery two weeks ago. I got to go to her physical therapy sessions on Wednesday and Friday as well as just get to experience in general what she is going through. She’s pointed out to me things that will one day be helpful to me as an OT to remember with rotator cuff patients. Stuff like the sling getting sweaty or bothering her neck, how to make a slushy icepack using alcohol and water, buying clothes that don’t require going overhead, how to put on deodorant (using Codmann’s (????) position), etc. She has a pretty high pain tolerance and had a great surgeon, so she is healing nicely. And her physical therapist let me use his goniometer to measure her external rotation in the scapular plane! It was cool, I guess I get excited at the little things in life…

It’s past 10pm here and I’ve had a long day of traveling, which included driving through a horrific storm and having to pull over on the side of a freeway for a while because the rain was so torrential. That was a rather harrowing experience. So I’m tired and going to go to bed, even though ideally I’d impress any new blog readers with a stunning & articulate new blog post (ha!).

Feel free to read old blog entries if you desire by clicking on the Older Posts link at the bottom, or clicking on the archives on the sidebar. Otherwise, check back soon, I’ll try to post something interesting! Also, all the OT blogs and OT-related blogs I’ve listed on the sidebar are great reads.

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PS: The picture is of my California cat enjoying the sun…he liked it better when we’d sunbathe together.