Sometimes things don't go as you'd planned. Sometimes the plan and the reality are not even on speaking terms with each other. This is what OT shadowing session #2 was like.
I met Molly, who is Kay's partner OT, at their office. She introduced me to the facility owner, Bill, whom I did not get a chance to meet last week. He has been a therapist almost as long as I have been alive, and I am no spring chicken, so this gentleman has really been there, done that, and bought the T-shirt. Something about OT must keep you young, because neither Molly nor Kay nor the facility owner look anything like their chronological age. Molly and Bill were discussing some sort of legislation governing Medicare reimbursements in other states and most of it went sailing right over my head.
After faxing in some paperwork, Molly drove to the client's home with me following her in my own car. The client recently came to live with her daughter, and the daughter had just finished cleaning out her mother's old home. Molly was there to meet a contractor who was coming to discuss installing a wheelchair lift outside the front door so that the client would be able to enter and exit the house more easily. The contractor was supposed to come during a two-hour window.
While we waited for the contractor, Molly showed the patient, whom she's been working with for a couple of months, a pot and some baking supplies. "I thought since we've talked so much about how you love to make cookies, that we could bake some cookies while we wait for the contractor to come."
The client, who was warm and friendly, just a very nice woman, suddenly shut down. "No cookies!" she insisted.
Molly tried to persuade her, but the client was firm in her conviction that she wanted absolutely nothing to do with cookie baking today. Realizing the cookie thing was just not going to fly, Molly worked on getting the client walking around in her walker. The house had extra boxes and things lying around from the client's old home, including some lovely old-fashioned hat boxes (the round kind with fancy corded handles). The hat boxes were right in the client's intended path, so we started talking about them.
"I LOVE my hats," the client told us, and before you know it, we had an impromptu hat show in the living room with the client sitting in a regular chair rather than in her recliner. It was fun! The client opened each box, removed the paper from inside each hat, and told us about it--where she'd worn it, the outfits she had that went with it--it sounds silly, but it was a great exercise for her and fun for us. She even modeled a few of them. And the hats were gorgeous. Most of them were very elegant leather-trimmed suede or velvet pillbox hats from the early 60's. Very tasteful.
By the time the hat show was over, we had burned through a little more than half of the two-hour contractor window, so Molly called and left a message. Then we found a bag with wooden letter cutouts shaped like things that began with that letter (for example, the E was cut in the shape of an elephant). Molly asked the client to check and make sure the whole alphabet was there (we really weren't sure--another item from the attic of her old house), and the client laid the letters out in order on an adjustable rolling table placed in front of her chair. We talked about the items pictured on each letter (she apparently didn't play dominoes growing up!) as we went. Then Molly told her to close her eyes (I played along by turning my back) and removed a letter. The client had to find the gap and then name the letter that was missing. We did this 8 or 10 times, and then Molly noticed that the client was leaning toward her weak side, so she got to go back to her recliner after that.
Still no contractor. Molly left another message and then took me upstairs to show me the modified bathroom. It had a tub transfer bench with a cutout and an extra grab bar affixed to the outer edge of the bench. There were also three grab bars fixed to the enclosure itself and a nubbly bath mat inside the tub to prevent slippage. Molly demonstrated how to use the transfer bench, and then she showed me the chair lift on the stairway. You get in at the bottom of the stairs and flip a switch, and then you ride up the stairs to the top. I'd never seen one of these in person before and I was very taken with it.
Shortly thereafter, the two hours were up and the contractor was still nowhere to be seen. Oh, well. Molly had to go to another appointment, so I drove to a local BBQ place and took home some tasty pulled pork for lunch.
This visit: 2 hours, 15 minutes Total observation time: 5 hours, 15 minutes
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