A quick update

It has been a busy week. My second Abnormal Psych exam was Monday the 11th, so I spent the whole weekend beforehand studying. The exam seemed pretty easy--on one of the fill-in-the-blank questions, the prof even gave us the first letter of the answer, which I thought was extremely generous (and unnecessary for anyone who actually bothered to study).

Tuesday I went shadowing, but I was only able to observe one client. The OTs have to get permission from their clients before they can bring me along, and understandably, not everyone wants to have an extra person cataloging their vulnerabilities. And you definitely don't want to have someone observing the first time you meet with a client. Such was the case this week, so I met Kay a little later in the morning outside the building of a client who was okay with the extra eyeballs. The client, Lottie, was a lovely woman in her 80s, laughing at her shortcomings and telling jokes the whole time we were with her. Her main issue was low vision, so Kay was going to work with her on operating the player machine she had gotten from the state library for the blind and physically disabled. Unfortunately, we couldn't find the little discs to go in the machine. Lottie is careful not to move things around because she knows she will have trouble finding them again, and she was sure they were on the table, but we couldn't turn them up. After a phone call or two, Kay discovered Lottie's daughter had sent them back, thinking they were overdue! Oops. So we worked on other things instead, including climate control. I never realized this before, but do you know how hard it is to adjust a thermostat when you have a severe vision impairment? Lottie has a digital thermostat with a simple slider for warmer/cooler, but she never uses it because she can't read the temperature on the digital display. It's way, way too small! When the weather gets hot, as it did this week, it's a major concern if your client is just leaving the window open because she can't use her thermostat to set the air conditioning. (Whatever happened to Universal Design??) So it was a short 1 hour and 15 minutes this week, bringing my total observation time to 8 hours and 30 minutes.

We got our Abnormal Psych exams back on Friday, and guess who got ANOTHER perfect score? Yup. There were five perfect scores, so the exam really was easy peasy, but this puts me in great shape for exam #3. As long as I don't completely bomb it, I should be able to start filling in my prereq sheet with a big fat A.