Week 4: November 8, 2008

One of the amputees that I have been working almost exclusively with is an elderly gentleman who is an outpatient with a below knee amputation. He comes 3 times a week, each for around 2 hours. Over the past few weeks I have drifted towards him because he is a very interesting character, but also because without guidance, he would choose not to do a whole lot of work when he comes to the gym!

From working closely with this gentleman, I feel we have developed quite a close patient-therapist relationship. Because of this, I believe we have been achieving a fair bit and it feels great to know that I am actually helping someone. However, problems with the patient’s prosthesis fit have been causing considerable pain of late, which has unfortunately been limiting our progress.

Because of these problems, the patient was booked into the weekly amputee clinic/check-up for outpatients. On this day, I got called into the clinic, because I had been requested by the patient. After a chat with the patient, doctor and the prosthetist, where I basically informed them of the what had been happening over the past few weeks, the problems that we were having and what I thought was going on, a new plan was decided upon. Originally, the patient was going to get a whole new leg, but from the information that I provided, which the patient either didn’t tell or simply forgot, the prosthetist ended up just adding some extra padding to the back of the prosthesis. And judging of the vastly improved performance the following day in the gym, it worked! WOOP!

So, yeh, that was pretty rewarding for me! But to sum things up, I learnt some of the benefits of working closely with a patient, and especially those associated with a rehabilitation setting, where, by essentially being the sole therapist with the patient, I had the knowledge on what progress was/wasn’t being made. Obviously it’s not always advisable to have just the one therapist working on a case, for example it’s good to have opinions and suggestions from multiple directions, but by having someone there for most, if not all the time, they will be in a good position to decide what the next step should be, in order to maximise recovery.

All is good! Only 1 week to go!!!

Ozzman out!