Learning Experience 3: Special Olympics

Over fall break, one of my professors took a group of students to Special Olympics Fall Classic to perform health screenings.  This event attracts over 1000 individuals with special needs from all over Texas who compete in golf, aquatics, bocce, and softball.  During this event, our group from TCU measured height and weight, took blood pressure, and did bone density scans on about 120 athletes.  While I have worked with people with special needs on many occasions, this event was different in that I was there to perform health evaluations rather than assist the athletes one on one or just have fun.  This gave me a new perspective on what life is like for these families on a daily basis and furthered my insight into the healthcare field.

            Normally when I am around people with special needs I am there purely to assist with fun events.  I help with programs including summer camps, parents night out, and sporting events, which are often the highlight of these people’s month or even year.  The participants come in high spirits and are excited about what the event will hold.  Contrastingly, at this Special Olympics event we were doing things that most people consider to be particularly un-enjoyable.  We were using tools like blood pressure cuffs and bone density scanners that may look scary and are usually associated with the doctor’s office.  Many of the participants were even afraid that we were going to do something painful like give them a shot.  As someone planning to work with individuals with special needs, I found it interesting that these people were so scared of medical tools despite the fact that most of them visit doctors far more often than the average person due to their complex medical conditions.

            This made me consider how I as a future healthcare professional can help to alter my patients preconceived notions about the medical field.  As I performed bone scans throughout the day, I found that the most effective way to help these patients was simply to spend extra time with them.  If I took the time to explain why were doing the bone scan and how it worked, the participants were usually more comfortable and less afraid even though they had never seen the machine we were using before. 

Spending this extra time with patients is unfortunately not always feasible for healthcare professionals who often have completely booked schedules with limited time allotted to see each patient.  However, if physicians, therapists, nurses, and other individuals in the medical field could take even five minutes out of each appointment to slow down and explain things especially for these individuals with special needs, it may have a large impact on their experiences in hospitals and doctors’ offices in the future.  I realized during my experience at Special Olympics that patience is imperative in turning an initially scary experience into one that is informative and even enjoyable for both the athletes and their families.

Laughter Blog 2: An Odd Student Professor Experience

I find that most often when I laugh uncontrollably, the story does not sound nearly as funny when I recount it to others who were not there.  Events that cause uncontrollable laughter tend to be personal and dependent on the situation and the people who experienced it with me.  One such situation happened to me this past summer.

            Over the past year, I have been working on my senior thesis project.  As part of this study, participants wore a physical activity monitor that must be downloaded onto the computer in my professor’s office.  Fortunately I had plans to visit Fort Worth in July for a friend’s wedding, and this was the perfect opportunity to reset the monitors.  There was only one problem: my professor was spending his summer in Canada and would not be there to help us through the process.

            A friend who is also researching with this professor and I were able to borrow a key to his office and call him so he could walk us through the steps, but then we had to turn on his laptop, which is connected to his desktop computer.  This seems like it should have been a simple task.  Just push the power button, right?  Well, all five times that we tried this, the desktop came on, but nothing happened on the laptop.  We even went so far as to take out the battery and put it back it.  Still nothing.  By this point we were getting pretty frustrated and concerned.

            This is when my professor decided to ask us if the desktop had ever come on.  We told him that, of course it had, but still nothing from the laptop.  Much to our surprise, he began laughing and told us that this was exactly what was supposed to happen all along.  The laptop does not turn on until you log in on the desktop.  That was when we starting laughing too and could not stop.  We were laughing in relief; laughing at our own stupidity; we just could not stop laughing.  We had spent over half an hour turning the computer off and on only to find out it had been working the whole time!

            Thinking back on it, it is amazing that such a simple thing could make us laugh so hard.  However, even now, every time one of the three of us brings up that day in July we start laughing again.  Moments like these are not soon forgotten and instead help to grow relationships and add deeper meaning to the time people spend together.  Sometimes it is not the actual hilarity of the situation that makes one laugh uncontrollably, but rather it is having just the right chain of events lead up to a moment that can turn an initially frustrating situation into one that we will remember and laugh about for years to come. 

Laughter Blog 1: Quoting Disney Rides

My family is obsessed with Disney World.  I don’t mean we like to go there and we’ve been a few times.  I mean we get to the parks at 6:30am before it gets light, we know exactly when the “180 days before our trip” mark is so we can make dining reservations, and my sister’s life goal is to become an Imagineer so she can design rides.  As a result, we have many of the rides memorized and often use phrases from them in our regular conversations.  Yes, we are complete Disney nerds.

            On one occasion in particular, we took this ability to quote rides a little too far and ended up laughing uncontrollably.  My mom had said the innocent phrase, “hello there” as she walked in the door.  This happens to be the opening line spoken by a dinosaur hand puppet in the intro video of one of our favorite rides at Animal Kingdom. Saying this one simple thing led to a long chain of increasingly obscure Disney ride quotes and the sharing of many memories from our numerous Disney World trips.  We remembered various experiences with characters, the many times that rides have broken down or been temporarily stopped with us on them, and all of the crazy and amazing things we’ve been able to do while at Disney.  By the end of the conversation, none of us could control our laughter.

            Moments like this one have a positive affect on my life in that they remind me about the importance of laughter in family bonding.  Especially as my sister and I grow older and spend much of the year away at school instead of with each other, connections like this one become more and more critical to remaining as close to one another as we were when we were younger.  Friends and other people in our lives come and go as we move to new places, graduate from schools, or take new jobs, but family is a constant.  Family members are the people one can rely on regardless of his or her current situation.  Through laughter, ties to family can be strengthened and provide meaningful memories during the often limited time we have together.  Having unique ways of laughing with family that cannot be shared with anyone else, such as my family’s habit of quoting Disney rides, brings us together in a special and personal way. 

Learning Experience 2: Civilization

Words are not my thing.  I have never been good at spelling or memorizing definitions, and having spellcheck and dictionary apps always at my fingertips has made it even worse.  As part of this, I have never spent much time considering the origins of words or the meaning behind them.  It has just never really mattered to me much.  As a result, I found the conversation we had about the word civilization to be particularly intriguing.  I had never before thought of this word as having negative connotations seeing it as simply meaning an organized group of people and had not considered any negative implications that it may have.  Our discussion about how defining someone or some group of people as civilized implies that there is someone else who is uncivilized made me think about how I use the words and who I would consider “uncivilized.”

            After thinking about it, I realized that there is not anyone or any group of people that I truly consider uncivilized when the situation and context of the group is taken into consideration.  When people refer to someone else as uncivilized, they are almost always comparing to their own culture and identity.  From this point of view, the “uncivilized” person certainly could appear to be separate or unsophisticated.  However, when compared to one’s own society and kin, the person formerly considered “uncivilized” no longer seems so.  Instead, the roles may even be reversed from that person’s perspective. 

In addition, as a westernized culture, Americans tend to equate technological advancements with moral and ethical superiority when, in fact, these advancements often push us apart and lead to poor decisions.  Rather than spending time together benefiting from one another’s company, something that we claim to value in our society, we actually break down our communities through the use of technology.  Where it used to be common to have long conversations over lunch or on the phone, people now rely on text an email to communicate and are constantly in a hurry to make it to their next commitment.  If anything, I almost believe that we are the ones who are becoming “uncivilized” as we lose our connections to each other and become more distant. 

Since this conversation, I have been more focused on the underlying meaning of words and the context in which they are used.  While I often think that our society is becoming too “politically correct,” I also recognize that many words that I have not even considered may be offensive to people as a result of their unique backgrounds and life experiences.  Words like civilization and uncivilized are used in normal conversation everyday without any consideration about who they refer to.  Most of the time, people who use the word “civilized” are not directly thinking of anyone in particular who is uncivilized, but does that make this implied comparison ok?  My hope is that when I hear others use the word civilized or other words that have westernized definitions or connotations in the future, I will be able to recognize the shortcomings of these words and learn about our own society’s shortcomings from their use.

Learning Experience: Learning Through the Skull

Learning Experience: Learning Through the Skull

When I began college, I took everything that professors said at face value.  I believed that they had earned PhDs for a reason and, therefore, knew all of the information and always had the correct answers.  However, during my time at TCU, I have been taught to question what I am learning and form my own judgments on what is true or correct.  In particular, as I have moved up in my education and been taking more and more complicated courses, I have found that sometimes the answers are unknown not only to me, but to my professors, and even the top researchers on the subject.  Not always having the answers has taught me to question what I read and speculate about what I think is occurring in a set of data or a piece of literature rather than just accepting the conclusions that the author came to. 

            Yesterday I had a learning experience that made me look back on how far I’ve come during college in my thinking and reasoning ability.  A friend and I are teaching assistants for Anatomy and Physiology.  This is a class primarily composed of freshman nursing students who have not yet gone through this critical thinking transformation that I have experienced while in college.  Yesterday’s lab was over the bones of the axial skeleton, which includes the skull and the spinal column.  As most of the students were finishing up and getting ready to leave, my friend and I picked up one of the skulls that had a large lump at the top if its head.  Rather than just accepting that this person had had a skull deformity, we began to speculate about what could have caused this problem.  We noticed that his (we assume this was his gender) wisdom teeth hadn’t grown it yet indicating that he was only around 20 years old at the time of death, but he already had several gold teeth.  Based on these findings and others, we guessed that he had may have suffered a traumatic brain injury called contrecoup where the brain bounces in the skull and is injured at a point opposite that of the impact site we could see on the skull.

            This experience reminded me of the importance of being able to work things out without any details or anything being handed to me by the professor, and we actually found it to be fun.  It was like a logic puzzle, but this one didn’t have any known correct answer.  As a future physical therapist, I will often see patients with minimal medical history and have to use my own knowledge and skills to determine what is wrong with them and then formulate an effective treatment plan.  Doing similar activities in the classroom as I did yesterday helps to prepare me to do this in real life situations once I finish graduate school.  Our friend with the skull injury may be beyond saving, but my physical therapy patients won’t be, and experiences at TCU like this one set me up for success in my future career.