Week 2: October 21, 2008

Today just seemed like a really long day… Really, really long… But I got through :)

First thing this morning I had a young male patient with an above knee amputation and today was his second day with his prosthesis. My supervisor helped him to get the prosthesis on, gave me the very brief instructions “get him doing some stepping exercises” and then left me alone. The only problem with this was the fact that I hadn’t previously done any work with someone at such an early stage in their rehab, so I didn’t know what I theoretically could and could not do for my exercises and in all honesty, this both annoyed me that I was put in this situation but also had me thrown back a little. I was worried I would start at an inappropriately high level and it was only the patient’s age and known upper limb strength that gave me the confidence to proceed.

I started in the parallel bars with some step ups onto a block, and some heel placement exercises (‘squashing a cockroach’) and the patient was incredibly keen to start walking, so I let him and he looked pretty good. My supervisor came back and said that it was good I was getting him to walk, at which point I was feeling pretty good about myself! But then it came! “So did he do this, this, this and this, how did he look doing this and how many of these did he do?” and I realized things weren’t so great! My supervisor explained that it was ok in this instance to have skipped over a few things because the patient was young, fit and already quite safe, but otherwise I should have progressed slower. I also needed to pay more attention to what I was observing and then think about what could be done to change any faults, so look at quality of the exercise and not just the fact the movements we being performed. But I’ll definitely know for next time!