Week of May 4-9, 2009

 

Daily activities 

 

Monday: Today was my first day of my Senior Project. I arrived at school at around 7:30-8:00. I met up with Stephanie Pascuale at around 8:15 and arrived at Ragged Mountain Physical Therapy at 8:30 where we met my sponsor Diane Fowler. We started off the day with our first patient who was a former Tugboat captain, who dropped out of the maritime business but recently decided that he wanted to go back into the shipping business. Stephanie and myself observed Diane as she preformed a serious of easy but necessary steps and test for the former captain to be re-instated. Some examples of the tests were climbing up a flight of stairs three times, balancing on one foot, and walking in a straight line, somewhat like the sobriety test that police officers perform. When our first patient left Diane, Stephanie and myself looked over what we were planning on doing for the week. After about a half an hour of scheduling our second patient came in. His name was Mr. Brewster who was an 81-year-old resident of Andover. He, as Diane described has had many problems with his body ranging from an operation on a rotator cuff to a stroke. Mr. Brewster was very interesting, for an 81 year old he was very active, he was planning on playing golf tonight with his “Twilight” golf buddies, and he said that he needed to be ready for his match. Today was a learning experience for me in many ways. It showed me what a typical day for a Physical Therapist would be like, how you can treat the same problem with different techniques, and it showed me what my project would be like for the rest of the period.