10 Minute Tuesday- Intro and cell phones

I am going to start my new feature, which may dribble a bit in the holiday time but I want to make it regular in 2013. This involves me writing for 10 minutes and topic switches are permitted- anything to get the post written!

Obviously I missed getting this done on Tuesday but I essentially worked 13.5 hours and was nothing short of exhausted. Did inpatient hospital in the morning, outpatient in the afternoon, and an early intervention client late that evening. It's funny to see sensory overload sometimes, I came home and my husband wanted to talk to me about a video he was watching at the same time that there was something on the TV and I just had to tell him to choose. I could not possibly focus on all that when all I really wanted to do was get in a fetal position and sleep for 20 hours.

Sad that I missed today's #occhat which appears to be on adaptive equipment use and practices when issuing equipment. I have lots of thoughts on that and have posted before, may need to do another after reading their grabchat. I also have interesting really old-school AE pictures from when my mom was in school to do voc rehab. It's neat to me to see how people used to make certain things, and some of them have completely gone out of vogue but would still be useful. The copyrights are expired on most of them so I will have to scan in some pictures if people are interested.

OK my main topic was going to be cell phones, and how essential they really are in today's world and especially my OT practice. I seriously cannot imagine doing my early intervention job without my phone. For today' client alone, I was able to do the following:

- text to confirm the appointment before driving there

- access my master file of client names and addresses

- get directions and navigation from an unfamiliar starting point

- show an app that would be helpful to the family's goals

Seriously, without my phone, I would have had to use my rolodex to get their number,  just leave a message on their machine and hope they'd be home when I got there, have to add in an extra 25+ minutes to get back on my familiar route, and spend a lot of time making equipment by hand. I have also used my phone to show a picture of a toy that would be helpful, and in the school system it was so crucial to get a picture of hand function for the evaluation. That's barely scratching the surface of what it is capable of, but I really couldn't do without it in practice.

Time's up! Hope you enjoyed this post and that I'll be able to keep up the pattern.