So it's been 2 weeks and the experience I've had is thankfully the opposite to my previous experience. The instructor is really nice, explains everything, and often praises me instead of constantly criticizing. It's a different hospital and everyone is much nicer than my previous experience. Also there is an electronic medical system, I can't explain how much I really love it.
Now one reason for this is that it's not as busy and there are not as many patients to see since they are fairly complex. I'm in the internal medicine unit and most of the patients are over 60 and have many complex medical conditions. Most come in for acute problems such as falls, pneumonia, heart failure, inability to cope and polypharmacy causing medical problems. Treating many of these complex patients requires a team effort, and everyone is treated equally and everyone's opinion is respected. This is also different from my last experience, where the opinions of PT/OT/social work was basically ignored.
The PT role in acute internal medicine, is to assess mobility and functioning and recommend mobility aids (cane, walker), as well as progress mobility. So in other words, it involves working on transfers (lie-sit, sit-stand) and walking short distances. We usually start with a person barely able to stand, and slowly with lots of encouragement and support (walker, PT), get them to start walking 20-100m. When they can walk independently for 100m and have no other problems, they usually either are able to go home or go to rehab to further improve their functioning.
We are usually able to see 3-5 patients per day, depending on whether they are medically stable to be walking (normal hemoglobin, no orthostatic hypotension). It is usually not that busy and we spent the last hour or so of the day charting on the patients we've seen.
Now compared to my last placement I get a lot less independence and a lot more support which is really nice. We see all patients together with the instructor, or with the OT. Some might say that by this time I should be more independent, and that I would learn more if I was independent, but the truth is I already had that experience, and it was very stressful, exhausting, and unsafe. Also the patients are elderly, and therefore much more frail which means, walking with these patients often requires 2 people anyway.
Now, in general, this is not the type of setting that I'm interested in working. The scope is fairly limited to working with patients for transfers and ambulation, which I don't feel requires any particularly special knowledge. I am more interested in working in outpatient MSK where we will get to diagnose and treat specific injuries. Also I do not enjoy the hospital at all, and am terrified of catching some disease from the patients such as flu, MRSA, VRE, etc. Now some people will ask, why I chose a HCP career, when I am not willing to work with sick patients with varying diagnoses? My answer is I don't mind working with sick patients, but I do have limitations and fears (ie; not being able to breath in a mask) and therefore will prefer not to work in an acute setting (no jobs anyway) and would prefer a more rehab environment where the patients aren't acutely sick (rehab, outpatient MSK).
Now I seem to always have some sort of problems, and unfortunately during this internship, I am still half sick and have not completely gotten over my previous cold. I am not contagious anymore, but it has presented numerous problems for me. I am constantly wheezing and hyperventilating and have gotten to the point of having an acute asthma attack. Now I do my best to hide these symptoms from everyone, but it doesn't always work well. This is definitely not ideal but I feel like I have no choice as I don't have any sick days I can take to get better, so I just have to hope that my lungs will slowly get better and I won't scare everyone with an actual asthma attack.
So those are my adventures, hope everyone enjoys their weekend!
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