The Start of Level Two

Today was my first day of fieldwork 2.  I went in feeling decently confident, but that was mostly because I had been in the clinic and met a few patients already.  I'm so glad I was able to spend some time at the clinic before starting today because it definitely helped my stress level.

I knew that today was going to be strictly observations.  What I didn't know is that my supervisor would be sick!  The day was slightly chaotic due to the two person OT staff being cut in half by my supervisor being sick.  We had back to back patients starting at 9am through 5pm except for our half hour lunch break and then our first afternoon patient was a few minutes late.  I saw a lot of different...stuff!  Different diagnoses, different ages, different activities, different assessments/tests, different behaviors...all sorts of stuff.  Some of the patients I cannot WAIT to work with.  Others, I hope to never have to work with!  A couple of them made me pretty nervous, and one of them honestly scared me.  It's been a long time since I've been around aggressive children...and it's a whole different story when they are aggressive because that's just their behavior, not because they are mad or in trouble.  Seeing an older teen pulling the therapist's hair, slapping her and trying to bite her was hard to deal with!  I feel like I need to be trained in some kind of self defense.  I guess working in that situation is the only way I'll ever be able to figure out how to handle it.

I'm anxious to go in tomorrow and maybe get to be a little more hands on with some patients.  Instead of sitting back and watching, I'd like to jump in and start doing activities with the kids.  I also hope that my supervisor is there tomorrow to cut back on the chaos!  I felt bad for the OTR I was with today because she was so overwhelmed with the day's caseload that I was just one more stressor to her.  I'm so excited to see where the next two months lead me.  I may leave a mad woman or I may come out with an even stronger desire to work with the pediatric population.