Some School Stuff

I love school. Really. I don't always love everything about it, sometimes I hate the stuff we have to do, but I love to learn and I love all the opportunities I get in grad school! We do some cool stuff.  I learned how to do a wheelie in a wheelchair, and how to go down the stairs and up a curb in a wheelchair. I've learned all about joint replacements and Parkinson's disease, Cystic Fibrosis, arthritis and more about the brain than I ever wanted to know. I've learned a lot about Neuromuscular Electrical Stimulation which uses electricity to make a muscle contract stronger than someone might be able to do themselves. (that's really fun to play with :) Physical therapists do so much, when I first got here I really didn't know what I wanted to do in physical therapy.  As I've gone through school so far I've started to get more of a feel for things and I've found a couple of things that I absolutely do not want to do.  (that being said I'll probably end up working in those things, that seems to be how stuff like this ends up) One of those things is wound care.  This past week has been a lot of learning about how to care for wounds, mostly pressure sores that come from lying in bed in the same position for too long. I don't usually get grossed out too easily, but some of the pictures we were shown were enough to make me nauseous. I could put some of them on here but you would probably stop reading my blog, you'll just have to take my word for it, there are very few things in the world that can compare with a grade 3 pressure ulcer on a make-you-loose-your-lunch scale. If you're curious though you can google it but brace yourself! If the pictures weren't bad enough, we had to practice some of the things you have to do to treat them.  Some people are so creative, since we can't practice on actual wounds, we got to practice on pig feet. Yeah, that just extended the gross factor. But I did it! Armed with just rubber gloves, a scalpel and some forceps. Yuck.

My friend Kate didn't think it was so bad, she likes stuff like this. I was completely grossed out. It cured any remote desire I ever had deep down inside of ever being a little bit interested in wound care.

Just thought I would share that little bit of weirdness we do sometimes in PT school :)