Being the therapist that inspires

I have pride today. Couple of days where I've been able to delve into projects and treatments and feeling quite good about it all. I've had some successes and am happy about it, so here's some notes on the whole business.

I've been working with a L MCA stroke patient and got to spend an hour with her today even though she is on acute care. Our acute care patients get short sessions too often, especially when we are overloaded elsewhere. But this little lady was willing to work and has good potential (I wish that the MDs would take our advice and send her to rehab instead of SNF, but that's a different story). We took steps, we did FMC exercises, we did self-ROM, and we opened 4 of the easy level clothespins 2x each. Those closepins were difficult for both of us, but she felt the taste of success and showed decreased depressive behaviors, so that was good. When I came back for her afternoon session, she said to her visitors, "That's my therapist! She's going to get me better!" BIG SMILE. She'll get herself better, but I will take the compliment. :)

My 5 year old from the post on Failures was back yesterday with his mom. We worked on some activities to challenge his balance, which wasn't difficult since his center of gravity is in his head. We worked on the swing (he does have independent reciprocal swinging motion!) and eventually progressed to catching and throwing a ball while swinging. I made big goofy faces about how strong his throws were and he giggled and kept going instead of saying "I can't" which is his favorite word set.

And I've been doing some good work on projects the past 2 days. Raided the speech therapy room (we are currently -2.5 STs) and borrowed a stack of books to explore. Among my finds was the Adolescent Test Of Problem Solving, which will be used on my 13 y.o. coming in on Monday, and a book on communication problems w/ pediatric TBI. The big ticket item though was the manual and installation disks (floppys!) for communication board software. I made the IT guy come install it ASAP as we get calls fairly frequently for communication boards for people in the hospital. It will take some getting used to, as it was designed for Windows 3.1, but I hope to persevere soon! Apparently, you can download a free trial of their new software here.