Monday, June 21st
A lot of new people came to the hospital today. We got 2 new volunteers from the organization that I'm here with. Both of them are living with me and Veronica at Damu's place. Julia, from France, and Mark, from Ireland. They are both very pleasant people and are great fun.
Also, with the departure of the last two physiotherapy students from Kathmandu College, three new have arrived on their last rotations of Physical Therapy school! They are a bunch of great guys, and they all have a lot of teach and have such a strong will to learn. It's really good, and I'm enjoying the new energy a lot!
Wednesday, June 23rd
This was a great day at the hospital, perfect for my birthday, haha. I was bored at the hospital in the morning, so I played with the kids in the play/education room for a while and ended up making origami balls/balloons. You know, the kind that you would blow up after you do all the folding, yeah? and I came to think...
Dude, this origami stuff would be great for post-burn contraction patients who are affected in the hands and arms to regain fine motor movements of the fingers and hands. Not only that, but it'd be great for any of the kids to learn and fine tune their memory and get their fingers and brains moving. I'm going to test the origami therapy on a patient who recently got surgery to release a couple of his fingers from a post-burn contraction. I'm going to challenge him, once he's ready, to make an origami ball using only his thumb and his affected fingers.
And you guys, the "origami therapy" only gets better...stay tuned.
So today, Shyam, one of the most senior physiotherapists, will start letting me work with patients 1-on-1 with their in-bed exercises. More on that later. I have also started working with one of the student physiotherapists, Sudan, with his patients as well. We have been collaborating on his patients to refine and keep excellent progress notes on those patients. Which brings us to the second half of the "origami therapy" idea...
This specific patient that we are working with, let's call her sally, recently underwent major spinal surgery, and in addition to her physical exercises, must work on her breathing as well. As many of you may know, post-surgical patients are often given spirometers for this purpose. This patient, however, didn't want to do these exercises, so I came up with the idea to make a series of origami paper balls in a variety of volumes and used different paper thicknesses to create levels of increasing difficulty for the patient to blow up the ball. This idea is really only being used with this patient right now, and is super quantitative, so we are still using the spirometer every couple of days to qualitatively measure the lung capacity and strength, but I think I may have stumbled upon something interesting......
Today, my responsibility with Ponseti method assistance also increased, and some of the other physiotherapists have begun to trust me with assisting them with patients and allowing me to do more of the casting. Hopefully in the next two weeks they will begin to teach me specifically how to adjust the patients' feet.
Besides all that, it was my birthday, so everyone at the house skipped the usual Dal Bhaat dinner and went out for some food on the town. I ended up having some chili buff momo's, butter chicken, lassi, and naan. It was a quiet birthday, not bad, not bad.
Friday, June 25th
I arrived back in Kathmandu on Friday afternoon after a quiet half-day at the hospital. I was excited to be able to update my blog with lots of new pictures, but not too excited about the exorbitant amount of foreigners and smog, but whatever.
Friday night was chill, I just went clubbing with some of the other volunteers. Nepali clubbing is always an experience.
Saturday, June 26th
Saturday deserves a better post, but I am really tired right now, so I will leave it at that for now.
Satuday
Bouda
Shivapuri
Dinner
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