Occupational Therapy as illustrated by LOLcats

DISCLAIMER: PLEASE SEE COMMENTS SECTION BEFORE READING THIS! Apparently this post is slightly more offensive/controversial than I would have ever guessed, considering my intentions were 100% benign and I only meant to amuse, not offend. I’ve addressed this in a post linked in the comments section, so please visit that if you do (hopefully not) take issue with this post. I again apologize for any offense I may have caused. I have decided to keep the post up instead of pulling it because dealing with the controversy it caused was a good learning experience for me and hopefully for others as well!

This is how many of our patients come to us, emotionally and physically…

Sometimes our patients are struggling with life-altering changes, like in the case of an amputation…Sometimes our patients just have bad habits we need to work on, or at the very least, need a referral to a 12-step program.

Sometimes our patients have trouble taking turns and need gentle but firm reminders.

Sometimes we can use Wii therapy with our patients, as discussed recently on www.otility.com, to make their therapy more fun and engaging.

Sometimes our patients shock us with their stories of occupational deprivation and it is all we can do to hide our surprise or dismay.

And sometimes, as occupational therapists, if we are unable to compartmentalize our workday and bring our emotions home with us, our patients will lead us to drink. If this happens too often, it starts the “Halp” cycle all over again. And this time we begin it as a patient, not a therapist.

The moral of the story? Don’t let yourself run out of happy.

The End.

You love me, you really love me! And I love OT school! And OT blogs!

::cries with joy:::

You love me, you really love me!

I’ve been having like 30+ readers a day and around 60 page views! I feel so popular. Now I’m going to become mean because that’s what all popular girls do, right?

This week my goals for occupational therapy school include studying for two tests and preparing for group (ie not procrastinating until this weekend then stressing out and writing OT blog posts that say AUGH AUGH AUGH), keeping up on the reading, working out 5 hours, and seeing my friend Doug a few times because he leaves for England for a year, in two weeks! And I just found out we have to go to three 12-step meetings BEFORE September 19th, I was totally planning on doing it in like October. So now I’m like :O…

Guess I better get on that! I want to hit an Overeaters Anonymous, Al-Anon, and AA. Problem is, we are kind of saturating a specific church out East, and I think they are going to quickly pick up on the fact we must be students doing a project. That’s not good for the whole “emic perspective”! (Hello, qualitative research design test next Monday). But all the other ones I have found seem to be in scary areas of town. Hmmm…

Ok, I’m going to finish gnawing at this delicious watermelon, shower, and look at some OT frame of reference notes before attempting to go to sleep!! Yay! (Do you like how I liberally sprinkled OT and occupational therapy in this post? I’m working on increasing my google rankings…)

Occupational therapy school, OT blog, I love you! And Google, I love you too! Boost me up in your heavenly rankings!

Signed,
Karen, Occupational Therapy Student aka OTS
PS: Aren’t I clever to talk so much about occupational therapy and blogs? It sure does make for thrilling reading.
PS2: Hey Will of famed Meta-OT, I have a Google Analytics account but I totally don’t get how it works!!!
PS3: OT school is splendiferously vociferously yet not timorously magnificent!
PS4: I’m not as ditzy as I appear on this blog.
PS5: Okay, yeah I am.
PS6: I decided this picture looks like me doing neuro-IFRAH on my San Diego cat.

Stream of conciousness, statcounter, Star dust…salliteration…silliness

I had a bunch of readers today too, according to www.statcounter.com 🙂

I can’t figure out why some days have so many more readers than others! Grrr! Somebody enlighten me! I beg of you!

I wrote THREEEEEEEEE entries yesterday so you should all pretend I wrote one Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, because I don’t have much to say this weekend – it’s not a bad upcoming week, but the week after that I have a test Monday and Tuesday and then I lead group on Wednesday (AUGH AUGH AUGH), so I need to be good about not procrastinating!

The last few days have been a lot of fun – Wednesday night I spent the night at Brooke’s aunt’s house along with Allison to study for a test, and Thursday night I got to go to the Memphis Pizza Cafe and then go see the movie Star Dust (really good!) with some friends to celebrate their son’s 13th birthday.

Conversation the 13 year-old and I had:
Me: Hey kid, guess what?
Him: What?
Me: The girls in my class think I’m smart.
Him: :::laughs hysterically::::

Today I worked out, went to Easy Way for some fruit, visited my friend’s house to feed their chickens/cats/turtles, napped, went to Costco and Wal-mart during a lovely storm and got soaked, then went to a friend’s house for dinner. They made salad, beef stew, and then watermelon for dessert and it was wonderful. I had a lot of fun with them. They also provided me with a bunch of food as well as some TOILET PAPER!!!!!!!!!! based on a post a few days ago I wrote that said I was on my last roll of toilet paper and would probably forget to buy more until it was too late because I’m so busy with OT stuff! AHAHAHAA!

Tomorrow I am working out, studying, meeting my wonderful OT friend Virginia, and spending time with a non-OT friend. Yay, fun weekend!

Hey, one last thing – today at Costco there was a mom with her little girl in a tilt-back wheelchair, and I was realizing that I’m slowly being able to recognize more components of wheelchairs based on our lectures/labs! It’s cool to think one day I’ll see someone zooming across the street in a power wheelchair or wheeling themselves up a curb and know exactly what is going on!!

Ok this ends my stream of conciousness. You know you love it. (See, I’m working on not being self-deprecating as my goal for Group, is it working yet?)

Our session on neuro-IFRAH

We had a two day, four hour workshop on neuro-IFRAH this week. This is basically a branch off NDT. It is intended for patients who are affected by lesions that occur at the level of the brainstem and above. It stands for Neuro-Integrative Functional Rehabilitation and Habilitation. The program was started by Waleed Al-Oboudi, MOT, OTR, who actually now has a clinic in La Jolla, CA (my hometown). One of his mentees (is that a word)? taught us, her name was Mary Lindner, I believe.

The first day, we discussed key components of this treatment. Basically, you look at the person holistically and examine 41 different variables that may affect the patient’s recovery from their stroke. The goal is to facilitate movement so they can regain as much movement as possible. We learned about things like “assessment of shoulder girdle mobility and control”, “facilitation of scapula and clavicle to achieve scapular adduction”, etc. We practiced on each other, using our hands in VERY VERY SPECIFIC ways on very specific parts of the body to help facilitate motion. It was a lot harder than it looked.

The OT teaching us was amazingly energetic and enthusiastic so it was a lot of fun. It definitely seemed like a great tool to add to our box of tricks!

The picture above is a picture I took during a break of all the people in my class (not including the distance component of course), since everybody was so colorful! Click on it to make it big!

The picture below is the OT illustrating a technique on Brooke!

Wheelchair Lab and Wheelies

We had a wheelchair lab on Wednesday night, 3pm to 6pm. A wheelchair rep came out and talked to us about different wheelchairs, and then we had to practice advanced wheelchair skills like wheelies!

I was petrified – I have a huge fear of falling backward. We had partners tilting us back and then were supposed to try and mantain that position. I kept on leaning forward and pushing my legs out because I felt like I was going to tip. I did actually fall back and landed on my professor’s knee ahahahaa. I couldn’t imagine trying to teach people how to do that! I could do popups or whatever though, like when you move your arms so quickly on the wheels it actually causes the front wheels to come up slightly. The professor put out wooden beams for us to pop over, and I could handle that, but it was too scary to imagine trying to go up curbs that way!

It was certainly an eye-opening experience!

A productive day! OT Diversity, baby

Today I was pretty productive. I had neuro, went to woodworking and finished my toolbox – YAY see above – and then I worked out. And then I came home, showered, did my SPSS labs 4 and 5, wrote in my required journal about the woodworking experience, made a CD of pictures for a few girls in my class, did my part of a cognitive frame of reference study guide, organized a two inch thick stack of newly acquired papers, called my grandma, cleaned off my almost full computer desktop, and now am crossing off my final thing on the to-do list, writing a blog entry. I work from 9 to midnight and my friend Doug is going to come over while I work to hang out and do his own thing, so I have a short amount of time to write this. I was extra productive today because I have a busy weekend coming up as well between seeing friends, pet-sitting, working out, and studying for 2 tests and group leaderships coming up.

I wanted to give an example of OT diversity – that two inch stack of papers? I organized it out so I could put it in the proper place in my binder, and it was a packet on neuro-IFRAH, a “how to write progress notes” SOAP guide, a wheelchair prescription form, some powerpoints on personality disorders, cardio-pulmonary rehabilitation, research statistics/project design, spastic hypertonia/tetraplegia, multiple sclerosis, frames of reference on cognitive-behavioral/allen’s cognitive levels/sensorimotor, etc, and finally, a woodworking packet.

I now present to you a little thing I like to call "Priorities Shifting" due to OT school.

OT School And The Priority Shuffle

Before: Pre-OT school

1. I would throw away old vegetables.
2. I would not let stuff stay on the floor.
3. I swept the kitchen at least weekly.
4. I did dishes every few days.
5. I would regularly straighten up my bookcases.
6. I would go through and throw away clutter.
7. I read magazines/books that came in immediately.
8. I would make sure my toilet paper/paper towel supplies didn't run out.
9. I knew where everything was.
10. I would prepare and eat healthy, chemical/artificial free nonprocessed foods.
11. I would regularly clean out my many e-mail boxes.

After: Mid-OT school:

1. I have sweet potato trees a foot high in my fruit basket.
2. Stuff on the floor provides important proprioceptive input to my tarsal joints when I run into said items so why bother picking it up.
3. Crunchiness on the kitchen floor gives much-needed sensory texture to my bare feet.
4. I do dishes once a week. (To be fair, I only use a rinsed-out bowl a day and 3 utensils so it's not that much).
5. My bookcases are a jumble.
6. I have precarious heaps of clothes and clutter near my bed. I will die in an earthquake due to suffocation from those heaps falling on me.
7. I have another precarious heap of books near my bed. Some have been there since January. If I don't die of suffocation I will die of a concussion.
8. I have half a roll of paper towels and no reserve toilet paper left as of today. You will hear cursing in about a week when I realize this matters.
9. I can't even find my black angel wings to wear to Roller Derby. Seriously, who loses that in a one bedroom apartment?
10. I live on Lean Cuisine, WW Smart Ones, Lean Pockets, and Healthy Choice for 2.5/3 meals a day. (hence, no dishes – see the genius plan?)
11. I have 3,400!! new e-mails in my work e-mail (I cleaned it right before I started OT school in January for a final time), 500 old unfiled mails in the Google box I cleaned this summer, a month's worth waiting at the hospital I volunteer at to go through, and at least 100 to file in my university e-mail. Oh, and 170 new ones in my AOL box. And I barely care.

Need I say more? I would if I didn't have OT homework to go do.

Wow I'm like dying from sleepiness

I took a THREE HOUR NAP today and it's 1020pm and I am tired! How crazy is that! I think I'm still sleep-deprived even with the occasional good night of sleep/nap because it's such a huge deficit.

I promise I will post something substantial in the next few days, hopefully tomorrow – it won't be that bad of a Friday – we have a neuro class, then we finish our toolboxes finally!! Then I'll work out. Then I'll finish my SPSS statistic labs and then I'll see friends and then I'll work 9 to midnight. And somewhere in there I'll probably blog!! Or web journal, as I like to call it since everybody correlates the words dork and blog. 🙁

That's ok, dorkiness is cool in my eyes. My newly black/squarey spectacled eyes.

Good night!

I swear on a stack of bibliotherapy

…that I will post later on today about neuro-IFRAH, group, research project design, projects, etc.

AND, I got new glasses!! Black and squarey! I'm moving up in the world of trendiness slowly but surely!

giant research test tomorrow nooooooooo

Ok, it is 730am and I FAILED last night at posting because work was busier than I would have guessed. Boo. Oh well. Today I have GROUP!!! (:O”) from 830 to 1030, then work out quickly, then home to shower/study for a BIG test, then back to class for a 3pm to 6pm wheelchair lab where we learn important stuff and how to do wheelies, I am scared because I'm a scaredycat of breaking open my head :O

Then Allison and I are spending the night at Brooke's aunt's big ol' home to study MORE after that, because the test is in the morning. On research project design. Augh.

And I was going to write more but posting about Group reminded me I need to find some pictures, so uh, yeah. Talk to you guys soon about Neuro-IFRAH and/or Group and/or lies, damn lies and statistics….

PS: Dude who wants to go to OT School, I haven't forgotten you, I just am a little scatter-brained right now. I'll try to email you within the week or you are always free to e-mail me again…