Thursday at Rose Manor

I felt nervous at first, since I didn’t know which patient I would see.  After I met the patient, I learned that she had Parkinson’s.  This required me to modify the activity that I had planned to use.  As I spent time with her and became acquainted with her, I felt more at ease.  I thought about her capabilities and appropriately downgraded to allow her to participate in the activity.

I was able to successfully utilize therapeutic use of self in order to make the patient feel comfortable and meet with her on her level.  Although I felt somewhat nervous, I was able to suppress the nervousness so that it wouldn’t affect her or our time together.

I want to become more comfortable in educating.  For example, with this particular patient, I want to be sure that any kind of educational demonstration that I do is something that will specifically be accurate and helpful so that it will benefit her with respect to her particular needs related to her condition (Parkinson’s).

I learned that I can put my fears behind me and I can make a difference on my patients’ behalf.  I have very much to learn, and even though I sometimes am nervous, I can push it aside and perform my job the way I need to.

When I realized that her condition would make it hard for her to participate in the activity that I had planned, I downgraded to make it possible for her to participate.  This was successful.  Even though she didn’t have fine motor skills, she was able to participate in the activity using the finger mobility that she had in two fingers.  Plus, after we had tried one level of activity, we tried another level that was somewhat more challenging for her.  She was able to do that, and this was very rewarding for me.  Also, near the end of our activity, she smiled and made a comment indicating that she seemed to enjoy herself.  That was very rewarding.

Since I didn’t know ahead of time which patient I would meet until a few minutes before I saw her, I was only able to take a brief look at her chart.  As a result, I wasn’t able to form much of an expectation regarding my visit with her. Since I had planned an activity to work on fine motor skills, it took me by surprise to learn that my patient had Parkinson’s.  As I mentioned above, this did require me to quickly modify my plans.  But I was still pleased by what she was able to do.  She unzipped the coin purse and slid the coins out of it; I didn’t have to do those things for her.  Picking the coins up from the table was hard, and I gave her physical assistance.  I was surprised that working with buttons wasn’t as hard for her as working with coins.

Overall, I was pleased with our session, and I’m looking forward to working with her again.