Chicken Dance!

I realized that I haven't had very many inspirational stories to share lately, so I decided to dig into the vault to start the week off with a pleasant reminiscence. On my last level 2 fieldwork, we got a particularly challenging patient into our rehab. Ms P had recently had a shoulder arthroplasty, but she had a complicated medical history. She was intellectually disabled and mostly nonverbal. My supervisor was cotreating her with PT, trying to get PROM done on her sore arm, which didn't work out very well, ever. She would resist and scream at them, sometimes she would just get up and walk out of the gym. When my supervisor left on vacation, Ms P's rehab fell to me. I tried a few activities, trying to get her to use her arm functionally since she was so resistant to painful PROM. One day I had the idea to try to teach her the chicken dance. The wing motion would get the shoulder abduction I needed and I substituted in a holding hands motion that got some shoulder flexion and extension. Ms P let me assist her arm through the different movements as we danced and sang in the rehab gym. We may have looked goofy, but we finally had a reliable way to get those exercises done. Always great when you can take a new look at old treatments. Happy new week, everyone :)