Haiti day 3

Today was an all around great day. In the morning I saw two PTs who had had strokes who did well with donated braces and splints and several patients who had wounds . The wounds came from varied sources including a thorn, two moto burns and varying ties wounds. None were super gross, but it felt good to dig back into wound care Haiti style. There are so many PTs in this group who do or are interested in wound care. start rant........ I wish New England would get wth the lrogrammand realize that PTs are just as capable of doing wound care as nurses. I am the only PT that I know of who does wound care in MA and it has been a lot of convincing people that I am legit and can do wound care... end rant.... anyway... the afternoon was less eventful, but I did a successful thoracic manipulation on one of my colleagues . Tomorrow I will have to try it with a patient ! After treatment time we geeked out over PT related things. There was a cervical ( neck) mania lecture going on while a few therapists were looking at x rays and a few of us were working on extremity mobilizations. My back and hips have never felt so good!
We later went for a walk around town( below pictures)  and had a salsa lesson! ( obviously my favorite part of the day. I was told by the teacher that I was dancing less like a white person. To me this means my Latin dancing has improved ( thanks Arthur Murray!) 
Now off to bed😴




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 3

Image
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 bo
Read more

Weekend days 7 and 8

Image
This weekend was a nice relaxing weekend. After the week 1 crew left the people who were staying two weeks headed over to Tortuga for some relaxing weekend fun. We took a speed boat over ( super fast!) and then zipped up to the top of the mountains in a tap tap. We unpacked all our stuff and then went on a hike. The hike was really cool. We walked down to some caves and saw all kinds of cool formations and then we walked around the island. It was nice and toasty while we were walking and it felt great to get in real exercise ! I then proceeded to nap for a few hours. After we all napped we hung out on the porch for a few hours and ate dinner . One of the girls brought a hammock so I hung out in that for a bit.  Sunday morning we headed back down the island, took a boat back to the main island , picked up the new crew and then headed back to Tortuga ( the other side) for some fun in the sun at the beach! The new crew seems great. There are a lot of people who like wound care and there a
Read more

Day 6

Image
Bon fait dropo!!!!! Happy flag day! Today is a national holiday in Haiti and people have work and school off. The clinic was just as busy as ever. We had a fun start to the day with the interpreters leading the patients waiting outside in a Haiti s national anthem. Immediately after we got down to business. I saw 6 people in the morning most of whom had ortho issues. I did my first solo cervicle manipulation and got a crack each time I did it!!!!! I also quickly saw another persons patient who needed stitches taken out... always good times. In the afternoon I saw a few people who had had strokes and several smaller wounds I have been following. The running theme of my day today was high blood pressure. I had a patient who had a blood pressure of 200/100 and a few at 180/100 eeek!!!! Luckily we are well stocked with BP medications . Educating people on food choices is one way to help control BP; however, The difficulty here is that people eat what they can get. If you advise them to lim
Read more