Well, it's hard to believe it but today marks the start of my last week at my first fieldwork site! (If you're confused, start again--at the title.)
Things became very busy for me the past few weeks. I have not updated recently and I apologize to any of you who are just dying to hear about my experiences! I'll share a couple "highlights" and then I'm off to prepare the house for family later this week.
I have experienced so many different things over the last 7 weeks. One of the biggest learning experiences for me has probably been learning about seizures. This is definitely not something we talked much about in my schooling, but is a VERY common issue with a number of my patients. I've witnessed a few different seizures in the last couple weeks. One happened at the end of a treatment session I was doing with a young 4 year old. It was a relatively mild seizure but it was somewhat frightening to observe as I was holding her in my lap. Her eyes darted to one side, she went into the asymmetrical tonic neck reflex (ATNR) and then became unresponsive for around 15 seconds. It is pretty typical for the patient to become exhausted after experiencing a seizure and that is exactly what happened. She curled up in a ball next to me on the ground and was totally out of it.
I witnessed another seizure just last week. This was during a session that I was just observing with an 11 year old. We were working on ADL's in the bathroom when she said she felt dizzy. The next thing I know her mom (who was also with us during the session) steps in behind her just in time to catch her before she hit the floor. She began shaking and all of the color went out of her face. The girls mom and my CI coached the patient to take deep breaths so that she wouldn't hyperventilate. She remained light headed for quite a while and then ended up vomiting a couple times. The mom requested that we call 911 because she had never seen her daughter do this before. I went to the office manager and quickly explained the situation and asked her to make the call. My CI and I met the EMT's outside and they took her to the hospital to get checked out. It was a very frightening situation for me. I thought to myself "what would I have done if her mom and my CI had not been in the room?!" I hope that gut instinct would have taken over, but honestly I don't know if I would have known what to do. We weren't taught how to handle patients during a seizure! At least now I have SOME clue what to do during a more instense situation though.
The last exciting story before I bring this to a close. I had 11 patients on my caseload today! One of them cancelled but regardless, it was a very busy day. Of the 11, 2 were patients that I had never worked with one on one before. All in all the day went really well. I have no serious complaints. I've had super busy days before but I was definitely more "on my own" today than I have been other days. My CI gave me good feedback at the end of the day saying that she thought I did a nice job with all the kiddos that I saw as she was keeping one eye on me and one eye on her patients. I worked nearly 10 hours today and with that--I'm tired so I'm going to get some work done around the house and call it a night!
Next Monday I will begin the end of this journey. I start at my second site and I am pretty excited.
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