Reflection #8

Stephanie Ortega
3/25/09
Reflection #8
Internship

Today when I walked in, there was patients already exercising and stuff. Usually when I come there isn’t much people there until around 9a.m., but there are times when I come in that there are patients there and getting attended. I guess every week is different. There were the same usual patients that come in, there were probably like three that I don’t or haven’t seen often. One of the office workers name Brian wasn’t there today, Sydney worked for him until around 1p.m. Brian came in, and so they must have changed schedules. I walked around and followed Mark around like every Wednesday I come and learn about what’s getting done on them and what problem they have and what caused it and the anatomy of it. I find the anatomy part the most boring part of physical therapy. But to be a physical therapist you have to take anatomy and learn about all the bones in the body, and some of the names are hard to remember and hard to remember where are their location in the body. I also helped a little and I folded towels. There were no new patients so I don’t have much to discuss in my reflection. One thing that I spent most of my time doing was working on my project. I got on the computer and spent most of the time translating the home exercise plans. I did the sheets, which is pretty good and I’m almost done with translating all the sheets in Portuguese. I only have left like two or three sheets which I’m happy, but after I’m done with the translations I have to put it together on a special program that my site has to make home exercise plans and add the images as well; and that will create a new home exercise plan in Portuguese, for the Portuguese speaking people. I spent and dedicated like two hours on my project because we weren’t much busy today. I was happy I got to work on my project because April is coming soon and I want to finish my whole project before April ends, so that means I will work on at home as well so I can get it done as soon as possible. Another reason is because I don’t like to leave things for last minute and it was already hard enough to think of a project for physical therapy. At first I wanted to come up with an exercises but I couldn’t do it because I don’t have a degree and I can get sewed because the patients can get injured and then it’s on me. Then I wanted to come up with a project that mostly focused on people not attending their appointments and not practicing their exercises at home. Since I couldn’t come up with a new system I decided to improve a system. My improvement is going to be more people will do their exercises because it’s in the language they speak and there are no excuses for not doing them. I wanted to make phone calls to the patients that have an appointment a day before, I thought that was a good idea and that’s suppose to remind people that we care for them and we want to see them and maybe will improve the attendance of the patients coming in all the time. But what I noticed is that I’m not going to have enough time so I decided to focus on one project. Internship gets boring sometimes at first I was very happy that I didn’t have to go to school on Wednesdays. But physical therapy is a little bit boring and it makes me sleepy, and it’s a little too cold in there. The part that is mostly boring is when I’m sitting down and there are no patients because there is nothing to do. But I was happy that I can do my project there and that keeps me a little bit entertained and not bored, during the times that there aren’t any patients.