Reflection #6

Stephanie Ortega
3-11-09
Reflection #6
Internship

Today when I went to internship, I saw a student who’s doing her internship there as well on Wednesdays. She told me she goes to Bayview, which is an all girls high school and how she has to go to internship every Wednesday from 7 to 12p.m., then when she gets home she just has to do a reflection that is only a paragraph long. I also asked her if she has to do an exhibition and she told me she doesn’t, that all she has to do is keep coming to internship until the first week of May, and then all the reflections she wrote each week just do a portfolio and that’s it she graduates. When she told me this I told her that she is very lucky, because we have to do ninety hours of internship, write a one page reflection single spaced, and come up with a project and perform our 30 minute exhibition. She was surprised and she thought it was a lot of work as well. She had to work wit one of the physical therapists name David. There were three new patients; I had to be in the evaluation room for two hours straight, because there was one after another of the new patients. The first person was a guy; he had problems in his back and knees. The first thing Mark did was ask him questions and find out as much information as he could, and see if he has any health issues so there wouldn’t be a problem when he is doing the exercises. Then after that he had to do a few exercises so Mark can see in what condition he is in and what do they need to work on. After the man, it was a woman. Before Mark meet her he looked at the sheet that she filled out, she kind of exaggerated on everything. She put that she was unable to walk and a lot of the other things she put she was unable to do, so right there Mark knew this lady was over exaggerating and he wondered if walking is something hard for her to do then how did she get in here. I think she should have put that she has difficulty walking. When she got up and was walking to the evaluation room, that’s when I noticed that she wasn’t walking right, she was walking kind of twisted. When she was in the evaluation room, I noticed she had some type of problem by the way she was talking and she would be moving her mouth around. I also found it weird how she has a buttock problem. It’s a very rare problem, and she is the first patient that comes in for that problem. When Mark was making her do exercises it seemed like standing up and sitting down wasn’t much of a problem for her, it was mostly when she presses that part of her buttock onto a chair or on something for a long time that gives her pain. Mark thinks the problem she has is a stiff muscle and he will make her do exercises that will separate that muscle so it won’t be stiff. After she left I was watching Mark massage and watch the patients exercise. Mark and Dave also helped me come up with a project for my exhibition. It is that I can translate the home exercise plan in Portuguese, because a lot of people don’t do their exercises and most of the patients that go there are either English speaking Americans or Portuguese people. My other half of the project would be to call the patients a day before their appointment so that can see that we are reminding them to come in and want them to get better. There are some patients that miss out their appointments, and we don’t really know the reasons why, but we assume it’s because they don’t do their exercises, lazy, they forget about their next appointment, or they feel that they don’t get individual attention. Before I left I had to fold towels, it’s kind of fun in a way because I like folding stuff.