Merry Christmas Eve!

On Christmas Eve, a show was going on in the “market” for the residents, which was festive and fun! Most of the employees were planning on a short day, but to their disappointment, most had a good amount of visits to do. By today all the other employees were asking me how long I planned on staying and if I applied to work here. I would have loved that, but unfortunately that isn’t going to happen. Today Athina needed to do an evaluation on a new patient. She doesn’t always end up working with the people she evaluates but she got to this time! An evaluation is used to review medical history, confirm domestic details (like the amount of stairs in their home), and discuss insurance. This patient was a sweet older lady named Mary who suffered from dementia. She was in the facility because she’d suffered a stroke and in the process had broken her fibula. The stroke had made speech unbearably hard for Mary, and when trying to form the words she wanted to say, she often became frustrated. She was in a thick and extremely heavy boot, because she was completely non-weight bearing. The difficulty with this was that she didn’t have a lot of strength in her other leg to maintain that precaution. An OT needed to come in and help Athina lift this women up and practice not putting weight through her hurt leg. When an OT and AT/PT work together they have to record that time as such. Athina kept her foot under Mary’s foot to make sure she wasn’t putting weight through the foot; however, due to her dementia, Mary forgot this often and would crush Athina’s foot. Athina would say, “Ow, ow, ow” to let Mary know she was using that foot. That system worked fairly well. I learned today that precautions are individualized and must be maintained for the safety of that person. There was a man who we worked with that had hip surgery and was not supposed to move his leg to his midline (the center of his body), nor flex his hip greater than 90 degrees. These precautions were kept to prevent his hip from dislocating. Another individual was not allowed to raise her arms above the level of her shoulders, lift anything more than 10 pounds, or rotate her torso due to some broken ribs. Others could not use the arm bikes due to high blood pressure, and had to use the regular leg bikes for cardio instead. You have to be very careful to remember these things in order to keep the patients safe and optimize their healing.