Journey Through OT School

Today in Neuro OCP, Lauren presented her case study on dementia. Her case study was on Ronald Reagan was our 40th president. In 1989, Reagan was thrown off the back of a horse and developed a blood clot, which is thought to be a cause of his dementia. I had no idea Ronald Reagan suffered from dementia, so I was very interested to learn how he coped after being diagnosed. One of my main questions is if the stress of being president had anything to do with his diagnosis. I think it would be interesting to see if there is any correlation between high stress level careers and the development of dementia. Lauren talked about some of the home modifications that are commonly used in dementia/alzheimer's clients homes and some activities that could be done to work on cognition and memory.

Today, I presented my case study to my group on Richard Pryor, who was a comedian that was diagnosed with MS in 1986. Richard was diagnosed when he was 46 years old. It's interesting to look at Richard's journey with MS because its likely that he was diagnosed due to environmental factors. Richard was a heavy drinker and drug user. He had a heart attack, triple by-pass surgery, and a suicide attempt before he was diagnosed with MS. Most likely, all of this is a contribution to his development of the disease.

Today in Neuro Tim gave his Case Study presentation on a 19 year old woman named Heather who was diagnosed with Huntington's disease from a documentary he watched. Heather's mom and brother both have HD, which is the main reason she decided to get tested. Normally, symptoms don't arise until your 40s, but Heather was diagnosed at 19. I didn't know much about HD until Tim gave his presentation and an interesting thing I learned was that HD is genetic, but it is not recessive. So, if you have the disease and have children, your children have a 50/50 chance of developing the disease. However, if your children never show any signs of HD, their children won't have a chance of developing the disease. I've never heard of a genetic disease that does this.

Today we had our debrief/course wrap-up in Foundations and I wanted to share what I learned throughout the 4 months of class. 1. I learned a lot about what exactly it means to be a good therapist and how you can provide the best care to your clients. 2. I learned how to be a better listener and to empathize more with my clients. 3. I learned what OT was founded on and what drives our practice today. 4. I learned how to be creative and think outside the box. 5. I learned practical things about the assessments I'll more than likely be using in clinical settings and when they are best to be used. 6. I learned a lot more about my classmates and my professor, which is a huge reason why I wanted to come to UTHSC. Those are the top 6 things that come to mind right away, but I know theres much more that I've learned. Overall, Foundations OCP was a fun, insightful class that I enjoyed taking.

Today in Neuro, Kiera presented her case study on Brandon Cox, who has myasthenia gravis. Brandon played football for Auburn and was the starting quarterback. Myasthenia gravis is an autoimmune disease that attacks the nicotinic receptors. Brandon was diagnosed at 15 years old. His major occupations are playing football and being a full time student at Auburn. His main complication with his diagnosis was double vision, which gives the appearance of doubles. This was a major problem as a football player. Before Keira's case study, I had never heard of myasthenia gravis, however I have heard of Brandon Cox so it was interesting to learn that he had this autoimmune disease.

Today in Foundations we learned about the therapeutic relationship and ways to strengthen it. The therapeutic relationship is the relationship between the client and the therapists, but in most relationships, both participants benefit. In the therapeutic relationship, it is all about the client benefitting. Inadvertently, the therapist will benefit because often helping client's is very rewarding. Some of the ways we learned to strengthen the therapeutic relationship were to develop good communication skills (verbal and non-verbal), work on being a good listener (through active listening), develop trust with your client, and to be empathetic. There were several other ways, but this is important in developing skills to work with your clients and lay a Foundation for us as practitioners.

In Neuro OCP today, Sarah presented on ALS and did her case study on Stephen Hawking. Sarah mentioned that an interesting fact about Stephen was that he was diagnosed in his 20s, which is rare for ALS since it normally affects older people. He was very healthy before diagnosis and didn't have a lot of risk factors for developing the disease. He also had low levels of stress. At this time, Stephen is wheelchair bound and has around the clock care. He has completely lost his ability to speak, and relies on assistive technology to communicate. However, that has not stopped him from public speaking and teaching. His main priorities are to continue teaching and speaking and to fulfill the role of a grandfather by playing with his grandchildren. The biggest role of OT for Stephen would be to educate caregivers on assistive technology and provide updated assistive technology. Stephen has also suffered from depression due to his ALS.

On April 26th, myself and some of my classmates attended the Memphis Rolling Grizzlies basketball practice. This is a local wheelchair basketball team that is sponsored (in part) by the Memphis Grizzlies NBA team. After watching the team practice for a few hours, we got the opportunity to get in their wheelchairs and see what it was like to play an adaptive sport. We also got to ask questions, and the players/coaches were very open and receptive to us. This was an awesome experience and I very thankful we had the chance to not only watch the practice but also get involved and participate. Being a former athlete, I often get frustrated with the level of play in the leagues that I play in now. On the Memphis Rolling Grizzlies team, there was a player who was a former college basketball player before he was shot one night while at a bar. The coach of the team said that if this player had not sustained a SCI, he would be playing in the NBA right now. Trying to put myself in this players s...

Today in Foundations we talked about culture. I think the idea of culture is something that is often times lost in translation. People think of culture and automatically think of ethnicity or where you are from, when culture embodies much more than that. Culture is more about tradition, which is where I think it gets confused with being where you are from. The best personal example I have for culture is my grandma. My grandma was born and raised in Thailand and was raised as a Buddhist. She met my grandfather after the Vietnam war when she as 18 and moved to the US with him. When she got here, she was exposed to Christianity and she converted her faith. However, even though she didn't practice Buddhism as a part of her daily routine, the traditional aspects still carried over into her life. When I was little, my grandma always got on to me for touching her on her head (I was little, climbed all over her, played with her hair, etc.). I didn't understand why this was such a big...

There are a ton of specialty areas that you can pursue after getting your degree in OT, but I wasn't sure exactly how many. After doing some research, I stumbled across an article that listed several. There were a couple that caught my eye- CAPS (certified aging in place specialist) and LSVT BIG (Lee-Silverman voice treatment BIG). I think I'm interested in CAPS because it relates to home health and that is a field that I am interested in learning more about and possibly pursuing a career in after school. I learned about LSVT BIG in Neuro OCP when we did a case study on Parkinson's. LSVT BIG focuses on using big movements to improve overall movements in people with Parkinson's. In terms of relating to AOTA's vision 2025, I think CAPS is easy to relate to that. "Occupational therapy maximizes health, well-being, and quality of life for all people, populations, and communities through effective solutions that facilitate participation in everyday living." -...

My main take away from Haleigh's case study was helpful repetitive exercise can be for a client with PD. Haleigh showed us progress of one of her mom's client's from using a 4 week intensive program called the LSVT BIG program, which is a program that focuses on using big muscle movements to help with gait, coordination and bed mobility. Haleigh showed her client's progress through videos taken one month apart and the improvement of her client's mobility is incredible. This program increased his ability to participate in things that interested him, like going out to eat with his wife.

Today in Foundations, we had an activity analysis lab where we got in groups and presented an activity we chose to our class. We had to break down the activity into steps and describe how they benefitted occupational performance. My activity I picked was making chocolate milk. It seems like an easy activity that is so simple that it doesn't need to be broken down, but it's much more complicated than meets the eye. Performing the activity, my group-mates mentioned things that could make the activity harder. It's interesting because it seems we take things like this for granted. I make a glass of chocolate milk every morning for breakfast, and doing this activity made me think about what would happen if I all the sudden couldn't do that anymore. When you analyze an activity, even a simple one like making milk, you realize every little detail that goes into it. Doing this activity opened my mind to how even simple activities can be challenging and how we can adapt the ac...

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug." -Mark Twain Reading through a guideline on how to document on people with disabilities, I learned a lot of things that I did not consider before. This guide was written with the help of a survey taken by people with disabilities. For example, a person who uses a wheelchair is preferred compared to "wheel-chair bound". The idea of documenting this way is to put the person before the disability. This goes back to the person first language that I've learned about throughout my time in OT school. Instead "MS patient", it should be "client with multiple sclerosis". How would you feel if you were constantly referred to by something that doesn't define who you are? As an OT and EVERY health care professional, we should focus on emphasizing abilities instead of harping on disabilities. Something that I read in this guid...

As an occupational therapist, occupation should be at the very core of everything we do. I read a blog post from the Practical Occupational Therapist about what it means to use occupations in our interventions as OTs, and I came across a line I really liked. "The reality is that if we don't have occupation at the forefront of what we do, then we are probably missing the opportunity to really help someone change their life" All activities should have a meaning and a purpose. Using occupation as a means and as an end is a hard concept to understand. Occupation as a means = using occupation to improve functions and skills. Occupation as an end = long term outcomes to help people become occupational beings again I like the way those two definitions are described in this blog post. Often, you hear "live life to the fullest" when you hear someone describe what OT's do/what OT is. This phrase fits in so well with using occupation as an end; helping someone ac...

My neuronote today is about someone I personally know. I played soccer throughout my life, and when I continued to play soccer after I graduated high school in various women's recreational leagues in the Memphis area. I play with a diverse group of women who have different levels of experience- however, most are retired D1 athletes who still want to keep their touch on the ball. It turns out, my mom is good friends with one of the women I had encountered through soccer. This woman was Jessica (Jones) Vinson. I went to her daughters baby shower with my mom when I was in high school, so she recognized me. She plays sparatically with some of the same women I play with, so I came to know her during the games she played in. Jessica is a huge advocate for Le Bonheur, especially their neuroscience department. Let me give you a little back story.... Jessica had a daughter, Rylee. Rylee was born at 32 weeks and passed away 8 days later due to complications of premature birth. To commem...

On 4/26/2017, we had a guest speaker come and talk for the last hour of our Neuro Aspects class. Fletcher Cleaves was a star football player who received an athletic scholarship to play at Lambuth. He trained hard to push his way to the top. But one day, everything changed. Fletcher was on his way home from picking up dinner with his friend when a distracted driver slid into his lane of traffic. Fletcher over-corrected to avoid collision, hit a guard rail, and rolled into a reviene. The top of his car caved in and Fletcher broke his neck. Fletcher sustained a C5 C6 spinal cord injury. He has no muscle innervation below his breast plate. Fletcher spoke about his journey through recovery and his adaptations to going back to school. The most interesting part of his story was not learning about the effects of an SCI (although, that was intriguing) but rather the attitude Fletcher presented while sharing his story. Not once was Fletcher negative. Not once did Fletcher say anything disc...

Cameron did his case study on Me Before You, a movie where the main character, Will Traynor, suffers a SCI. Cameron said that if he were Will's OT, he would have had to include Will's mother/care giver when he made a goal plan because Will's mental state was so negative. He had no interest or will to live at all. He mentioned that the biggest role of the OT in Will's life would probably be for the pschological aspect of therapy. Restoring his interest, motivation, and social life is key to a successful intervention when working with someone that has an SCI. His short term and long term intervention goals were all based off of his interests and life activities before the accident. Cameron brought up that every care-giver in Will's life up until Lou was there to just help him through the motions of everyday life. Lou was the first care-giver who tried to get Will involved in the things he did before he got injured. We all agreed that Lou acted very much as an OT for...

Again with the cheesy romantic movies, but I can't help myself. For my NeuroNote, I decided to do re-watch the Notebook for the 1,000th time. It's funny what you notice in movies when you watch them looking for specific things. This time around I wasn't watching to swoon over the relationship between the two main characters, Allie and Noah, but for the movies portrayal of dementia.  The Notebook is arguably one of the most popular romance movies of my time. It centers around the rocky relationship of Noah and Allie. I won't go into too much detail giving a summary, but basically the couple breaks up while they are young and find each other again when they are older. Allie leaves her rich, handsome, smitten fiancé for Noah and they marry and have kids.  However, the story of Noah and Allie is actually told by Noah, who is reading it out loud from a book to Allie in an assisted living home. The couple is elderly, and Allie has severe dementia. She has no idea who h...

Today in Foundations, we talked a lot about ethics and what it means to be an ethical practitioner. We started the discussion of ethics with Professor Lancaster asking something that we've learned purposively. The example one of my classmates gave was riding a bike (which apparently Professor Lancaster loves to teach...my little brother is 6, I'll have to let her help him out with that). Afterwards, she asked how we thought we developed ethics...if it was something we learned, or developed ourselves. I believe its both . I believe that you can be brought up a certain way, but your own thoughts, values, and morals will ultimately shape your own code of ethics. This is probably diving way too deep into the topic, but I'll provide an example. My mother was a single mom when I was growing up (deadbeat dad walked out on us when I was 4, maybe). I had a lonely childhood, went to an intercity elementary school, and lived with the bare minimum. Anyways, my mom raised me to be ...

50 First Dates has always been one of my favorite movies of all time. I love Adam Sandler (older Adam Sandler movies) and like I've said before, I'm a sucker for cheesy rom-coms. Thinking about what I wanted to write about for my next NeuroNote blog post, I was watching this movie and I figured... why not on 50 First Dates? It is a fictional disorder and a comedy, but it still shows the affect of TBI's on an individual as well as their loved ones.  50 First Dates came out in 2004 and is about Henry Roth, who is a marine biologist in Hawaii. Henry is a womanizer, often tricking tourists into sleeping with him with lies about his identity.  One day, he meets Lucy and they hit it off, however, the next day he goes to talk to her and she has no recollection of him at all.  This is because Lucy was involved in a serious car accident and suffered from a brain injury that effects her memory. Her diagnosis is a type of amnesia called "anterograde amnesia". She can...

I am a sucker for romantic movies; especially cheesy ones.  So I unknowingly rented Me Before You without really knowing anything about it, besides the fact that a guy in a wheelchair falls in love with his caregiver. I watched this movie a while ago, but I decided to re-watch it when I saw we were discussing SCI's in class. Re-watching the movie after having more knowledge on SCI's, I feel like I was able to take more away from the movie. First of all, this movie touches on much more than just living with spinal cord injuries. It talks about a pretty controversial subject (which I didn't even realize had so much controversy): assisted suicide. One of the main characters, Will Traynor, lives an incredible life. He is wealthy, handsome, has a beautiful girlfriend, lots of cool friends, and lives a lavish, adventurous lifestyle.  All of that changes when he is involved in a severe motorcycle accident and is left quadriplegic. Will becomes angry, bitter, moody and is not ...

As part of the content for my Foundations class today, there was an article on a language study called "'A diabetic' versus 'a person with diabetes': the impact of language on beliefs about diabetes". Throughout our time during Foundations, we have talked a lot about the top-down, holistic approach to health care. I liked this research study tremendously because I feel like it related to the holistic approach that we practice as occupational therapists. The article studied the effects of labeling a person based off of their disease (diabetic, schizophrenic, etc). These labels are believed to generate negative feelings and a stigma about the individuals condition. The study was an experimental cohort study, which evaluated the impact of two terms: diabetic and a person with diabetes. Interestingly enough, in the conclusion section of the article they found that there was no difference in impact between the terms. The article did state, however, that if they h...

Professor Jami Flick gave an interesting and eye-opening presentation during our last Foundations class.  The lecture was over health promotion, health literacy, and health prevention. Immediately, I was interested in this topic because I believe that the current trend in health care is moving more towards prevention. During Professor Flick's presentation I learned about organizations I had never heard of before, such as The Institute for Healthcare Improvement and their Triple Aim movement.  I think my favorite part of her presentation was over health literacy. While I was in undergrad, I was apart of a greek letter organization. Our philanthropy was literacy, so literacy is something that is near and dear to my heart. Since I've been apart of several events to raise money for literacy, I'm very familiar with the statistics related to illiteracy.  However, the video Jami showed of people who had been to healthcare clinics that were illiterate was VERY eye-opening. T...

Class today was an awfully heavy emotional load; we began our day with Pathology, and since it was the first day our professor wanted all of us to give an unique introduction. She wanted us to each state our name and share a problem that we had experienced at some point during our life and how we solved that problem. Some of my classmates shared superficial, light-hearted, funny experiences, while others shared personal, riveting, and deep stories. Some classmates cried while sharing these experiences and other classmates shared their tears while listening to their stories. After pathology, it seemed our emotions carried over into our next class (neuro-aspects). In here, we learned about traumatic brain injuries and non-traumtic brain injuries, how they are caused and their signs and symptoms. It is easy to read through these things on power points and on paper and not think twice about it, but once you listen to your classmates & peers share personal stories dealing with TBI's...

During Neuro Aspects today, we watched a Ted Talk about a woman named Aimee speaking on disability. She began the talk by reading off the definition of "disabled" along with the antonyms. After reading a long list of ugly, poorly chosen words, she continued to talk about people with disabilities become what you label them as. When you label a person with a disability as their disability, you limit them to what you think they should be able to accomplish, instead of seeing their potential. Why should a disability mean you can't become successful, be strong, and be happy?

This past week in Foundations we've learned a lot about theories and frames of reference in occupational therapy.  The first thing I think of when I hear the word "theory" is an idea, something that hasn't been proven, something that isn't quite concrete.  However, reading through the article from AOTA, Putting OT Theory Into Action: Knowing and Applying Frames of Reference, I learned that theory is a set of facts, concepts and assumptions that are used to describe, explain, or predict phenomena (Case-Smith, 2015b, p. 67).  The theories and frames of reference of OT are important because they justify why you are giving the treatment you have chosen. Reading through the authors personal experience in the article, I can grasp a better understanding that the frame work and occupation models are not just something that is written down in a manual as a reference. It is something therapists use to make sure we are giving the patient all that they need from an assessment...

The OTPF influences OT practice by establishing the way OT's work with clients. The OTPF is a summary of interrelated constructs that guide and define occupational therapy practice. In other words, it is the conscious factor behind all the decisions we make as therapists. The OTPF created the "top-down approach", which is a holistic way of working with clients. This approach starts with the occupation and looking at the person as a whole first, and then almost works backwards until you get to the diagnosis itself.