Today too new and exciting to report today! Every Wednesday is new assessment day at SPASTN, and we finally managed to convince Ramkumar that it would be interesting for us to sit in on some of the new assessments (rather than sit in the PT department with nothing to do because there are hardly any patients on Wednesdays). It ended up being a totally worthwhile and interesting learning experience! Although we couldn’t really understand what was happening during the verbal part of the assessment (most of it was in Tamil) we observed the hands on part of the assessments, and made our own inferences about the child. Then Ramkumar would pass us the completed assessment form and we could look over it to see if our observations were correct. It was really good! We suggested to him afterwards that if SPASTN has future interns from U of T that they let them sit in on assessments in the first week and then take some of those patients onto their caseload.
In the afternoon we watched a few more assessments and then headed to the library to finish data entry on our tardieu scale project (which we’re not sure if we’re actually finished collecting data for, but nobody has given us any more kids so far), and to do a little reading that Karthik wanted us to do about the perception of disability in India. Although the morning passed quickly, the afternoon seemed to drag on forever – it was really hot in the library, and lets face it: data entry is not that exciting.
At 4pm we made a quick stop back at our room to drop off some of our things, and then headed back to the school to meet up with Karthik. Karthik works in a private pediatric clinic in the evenings, and he’d agreed to let us visit to see what it was like! He helped organize an auto for us – there and back plus an hour of waiting time came out to 300 INR. His clinic (which he started from scratch on his own – very impressive!) is in a building which houses a small private school for kids with disabilities during the day. It is pretty small, but well outfitted – they even have a short wave diathermy machine! (Which by the way pretty much nobody uses in Canada but is still relatively ubiquitous in India).
When we got to the clinic, Karthik introduced us to everyone (we already knew Prem – a physio that also works at SPASTN during the day), and took us to the back room for a snack. He explained that in India when people receive visitors the best thing they can do to welcome them is to feed them. We each had a really tasty “egg puff”. It made us feel really special and welcome, although we didn’t want them to make too big a deal out of us being there! We’re just students after all. Karthik had Prem explain all of the administrative ins and outs of the clinic to us, and then we watched a bit of one of his treatment sessions and also an SLP treatment session. At this point we’d been there for almost an hour, and we didn’t want to keep our auto waiting too long (for fear of getting charged extra), so we said our goodbyes and headed out.
The auto ride home was a little bit hairy as always, but ultimately we made it back in one piece. We had him drop us off at Ascendas, and we treated ourselves to some tasty (and different!) Indian food – some kind of sweet tasting paneer concoction and a vegetable curry, served with Parotas and Naan. Yum!
We had to do the snake walk again tonight, but I have to admit, it gets less scary every time we do it. The security guard brought both his big stick and his flashlight tonight, plus we had our guard dog Blackie following behind.
It was pretty late already by the time we got back – our evenings seem to be going by so quickly these days! We managed to book tickets for a tour to Mamallapuram for this Saturday, and planned out what we’re going to do with our last few days here. Now we’re just writing some post cards, and then we’ll probably head to bed!
Goodnight!
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