First Clinical: Don't kill anyone

Dear Ones,

This last week was week one of my first clinical and it seemed to blow by! I work with two different physical therapists "R" and "H" but mostly with R. H owns the clinic and is the boss. They both were BYU and WashU graduates. R said his goal for us on this clinical was to help us realize how much we know. To be honest the students and I all feel like we know nothing. But like I learned to do in my internship you just fake it til you make it. Act confident and nobody will let me hurt or kill anyone (they'll stop me before I go to far).

This week I worked Mon-Fri but usually I'll have Thursday's off. However this town is so small that there was a funeral Thursday and the entire town went to it so H left all his students (there are four of us: 2 from WashU, 1 from Dixie, 1 from Rocky Mountain Univ) to run the health fair taking place in the county. We'll go back to Thursday's happenings later.

This clinic covers 2 county hospitals, 1 skilled nursing facility, and 2 out patient clinics. They are the only PTs in the county and seem to know everyone. We even do a little bit of home health visits for the school district. Everyday starts and ends with the hospital and the skilled nursing facility. The bulk part of our day is seeing patients in the clinic. Everyone said we'd be seeing a ton of low back patients but not this week. We have seen many cases of shoulder pain and neck pain, all resulting from poor posture over a life time. (Time for me to start straightening up I think)

The first couple days we did mostly observation to make sure we knew how R operated and how the clinic functioned. By Thursday they started dividing up patients for us to be responsible for. There was a patient who went unresponsive on us where the nursing staff came in...I was sure I had killed our patient. Luckily the patient was back with us after a few minutes. All that kept going through my mind is I am watching a person die. I was surprised with how calm the situation was handled and how calm I was during it. But my heart was racing afterwards.

My knee all taped up

During some down time in the clinic R offered to look at my knee for me which I hurt 3 years ago but still gives me trouble so in addition to performing PT I'm benefiting from it! All in all a busy but fast week! I've spent the weekend, thanks to my wonderful aunt and uncle, up in Utah county where I've been catching up with friends and family.
Life's sweet here!