P4R3W7: Treatment complete, no further action required.

The last week of my MSK physiotherapy outpatient placement rolled around very quickly. Here are my top five highlights of the week.

1. Passing the practical aspect of the MSK placement. My clinical portfolio is still being marked.
2. Demonstrating some good physiotherapy skills to my clinical educator. Up until this week I have had some poor performances, mainly due to being anxious when faced with questioning and being put off track by some lines of questioning. This week I was able to get into the flow of assessing and treating and I felt really happy that I was able to show my clinical educator the skill level that I had been achieving throughout the placement (we only have a 2h window to demonstrate our skills to our clinical educator each week).
3. The shared lunch on Thursday... it's tradition for students to provide some baking at the end of a placement to thank the staff which have accommodated them over the placement. I brought in some home-made brownies (the receptionists thought they might have been magic brownies). Other staff and students gathered in the acute allied health room and shared what turned into a massive lunch.
4. Getting well wishes from your clients.... lots of gratitude and thanks.
5. Treating some interesting case presentations this week. The first case of interest had a referral for a full thickness rotator cuff tear (supraspinatus) and bursitis of the shoulder. Pretty typical clinical picture, right? Wrong. It was somewhat interesting that the client had no pain given the bursitis. What was more interesting was that the client had a flicker of biceps activation (super weak) and limited supination with no known mechanism of injury. The second interesting case was that of cervicalgia (a sore neck) and severe headaches. Upon assessment I managed to aggravate the headache (woops!!) so much that I had the lights turned off in the treatment room. I was then able to adjust the neck in to a position that was known not to provoke any neck pain and apply some PA mobilisations which quickly eliminated the headache. Pretty interesting cases.

 "Treatment complete, no further action required."

The phrase 'treatment complete, no further action required' was a theme of my final Friday of placement. Instead of spending the day in ED, I was up on 5th floor writing my patient discharge summaries. This statement is one that we can select when writing a discharge summary. I feel like this now applies to me (for a couple of weeks anyway)... placement complete, no further action required.

Time for a week break!!

The mountains have had a good dumping of snow over the last week... time for some exercise!