Day 3

First day of clinic! What a day. Controlled chaos with over 130 patients seen by 30 PTs in a 6-7 hour period. To give you a better picture of the clinic I have attached a picture at the bottom of it before the patients came in. It is about 800 square feet with 14 beds. There are 30 therapists, 30 interpreters  and more than 30 patients and heir family members milling around the clinic at any given time.... all these people while we are doing gait training, family training for transfers , bracing trials and orthopedic interventions. That is what I mean by controlled chaos. Although I am constantly bumping into people and saying" excuse me" I would not have it any other way. If I have a moment of down time I look to the therapist next to me and 100 percent of the time they are performing an intervention I have not seen before. I look two feet beyond that therapist and see another therapist teaching a PT how to do walk using techniques I had read about but never seen. All the books in the world will never teach you as much as working in close proximity to other therapists. Although at home I learn something new each day, here it is like I am a student again. I love it!!!! 
Today I started the day with a patient who had undiagnosed neurological deficits,  followed by a young man who crawled everywhere. My goal for him was to get him bracing so he could stand. We did get him to stand with a KAFO and a lot of heavy lifting, but the smile on his face made all the sweat worth it. I then saw a few patients who had some wounds. I will spare you the details ,  but I will say I saw a variety of interesting wounds. the wounds ranged from a rat bite to a motorcycle accident to a machete wound. Wound care here is theoretically the same as at home, but the humidity is so high here that the dressings just do not work the same. It keeps me on my toes for sure! In the afternoon I saw mostly patients with Ortho diagnosis. The complaints were not the usually run of the mill knee or hip pain. I had a PT who had a kneecap in at least three pieces and a fibulae head above the knee( yikes!!!! Not at all where it should be). Pretty sure his ACL and PCL were not there. He had a ton of knee pain with walking( duh!!!) .  He had been walking on this knee for years. At home this person would have had a knee replacement or some orthopedic surgery to make his knee functions . I had another patient who had dislocated his hip 3 years ago that was never fixated . He had a ton of hip pain . Crazy the things that people are able to live and function with. 
We ended our day with a walk to the public beach , dinner and some journaling/ blogging time. Tomorrow we will start the chaos all over again, but instead of 130 we will see 150 patients.  Can't wait!!! It is gonna be great!!!!! Til tomorrow.......😜
   

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