December 7th, 2009

Monday was a pretty laid back day. Again, we both awoke with a big case of the Mondays after our wonderful weekend in Pondicherry. Neither of us were really excited to go back to placement. But go we did, and before long we were settling in.

We spent most of the morning finishing up our evaluations with Karthik and Ramkumar. The evaluations of both Priyanka and I went really well. After we finished going through those evaluations it was time for Priyanka and I to go through our site/preceptor evaluation with Karthik and Ramkumar. We had filled out this evaluation in the context of a Neuro internship, and since this placement isn’t actually fulfilling those criteria, there were a lot of “Disagree” and “Strongly Disagree” statements on the evaluation. Needless to say, we weren’t looking forward to sharing it with them. Although they took the evaluation well, they also both really took it to heart. It was a good thing, but it made us feel really badly at the same time. They were genuinely surprised to hear that the internship was not fulfilling our Neuro requirements and had been made into a selective internship, and said that they didn’t want us to be behind our class after we’d come so far for this internship. Although we explained that this wasn’t the case, and we certainly won’t be behind our class, they were still sad. I think when it comes down to it, this all happened because of several miscommunications. Priyanka and I were under the impression that our placement requirements had been made clear to SPASTN by our clinical coordinator (which obviously they hadn’t – either that or the message never reached our supervisors), and at the same time we hadn’t realized how different Indian PT placements are from our own (otherwise we would have made the requirements more clear to begin with). In retrospect we probably should have laid out exactly how Canadian internships are conducted and what our requirements are in the beginning of the internship. Live and learn I guess. We are breaking new ground here for new site for students from U of T to do internships, so I guess it is to be expected that there will be a few bumps in the road. I think that if students come back next year, SPASTN will have a much better idea of what to expect, as will the students that are going.

In the afternoon I had one treatment session (which went really well!) and then we just spent the rest of our time observing Ramkumar. He seemed like a really scary guy at first, but the more we get to know him, the nicer he is. I think deep down he’s actually a gentle giant.

We didn’t do much in the evening except to go to pick up some 5 L jugs of water we’d ordered from a nearby pharmacy and update our blogs. We both hit the hay pretty early so that we could be nice and fresh for Tuesday morning.