Priyanka and I both woke up with a pretty good case of the Monday’s this morning. After our awesome weekend neither of us were particularly excited to head back to work, even though we were to start our own treatments today.
We were hoping to go to the canteen this morning for breakfast to get some boiling water and hot milk to make oatmeal with, but I guess the message didn’t really go through, and the ladies arrived with our breakfast just as we were preparing to go to the canteen. In any case, it was one of my favourite Indian breakfasts – vermicelli noodles with lentils and coconut chutney. Pretty tasty stuff!
We had a pretty quiet morning – it was raining, and when it rains a lot of kids don’t come to school (don’t’ ask me why), so we only had one more student to do the tardieu scale on. This brings our grand total up to 15 kids. Initially, Ramkumar had wanted us to use the scale on 30 kids, but they are having a hard time finding kids for us to do it on, so we may scale down to 20.
When we headed out of the PT department at 11:30 am to observe in the hand function unit, I was sad to discover that someone had swiped my umbrella from where it had been drying on the shoe rack. I guess I should have known better than to leave it lying on the shoe rack, but all the same, it kind of irritated me. Who steals an umbrella? It was a pretty nice (albeit cheap) one too! Oh well…hopefully whoever took it really was in need of one.
After lunch we quickly planned out what we wanted to do in each of our treatment sessions before the kids arrived. Priyanka’s kid arrived first. Pediatric physiotherapy is a lot harder than it looks. The PTs here at SPASTN make it look really easy, but given that we don’t have a lot of hands on experience with pediatrics ourselves, we had a heck of a time positioning the kids the way we wanted to. Priyanka wasn’t given very much feedback during her treatment session, so we felt a little bit like the blind leading the blind. My treatment session didn’t go much better, although I did receive more feedback from Ramkumar than Priyanka did. Although the treatment sessions made the afternoon fly by, they were frustrating at the same time since both of us felt generally incompetent and lacking in guidance.
After work we walked to Ascendas to look for laundry detergent (which we didn’t find) and to drown our sorrows (well…that may be a little dramatic. Really the day wasn’t that bad) in an iced coffee from the Café Coffee Day that is there (my new favourite place). The funniest thing that happened today was on the walk to Ascendas when I got cat called by an entire bus load (and I literally mean an entire bus load) full of school kids. It was pretty hilarious. I’m guessing its because I’m a bit of a novelty to a lot of the kids with my pale skin and blue eyes J
When we got home we put in a phone call to our clinical education coordinator at U of T, just to clarify what the expectations surrounding caseload on international placements is. She was a little bit surprised that we’re not getting much hands on experience, but she did put some of our fears to rest when she told us that she would use this as our selective internship (you don’t even need to do a clinical placement for your selective internship – it can be administrative) and that we would be given neuro internships for our “selective” internships to ensure that we had enough neuro experience. That was kind of a relief, because we were a little bit nervous that this could potentially cause us to fall behind our class in terms of clinical working hours.
The rest of the evening has been pretty relaxing. I spent a good long time catching up on my blog, and then we had a nice chat with Priya (the PT), with whom we’re going out tomorrow night to check out a festival that is going on in Tamil Nadu.
Right now I’m just going to do another quick email check and then probably curl up for the evening!
Goodnight!
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