The internship phase of grad school has been an adjustment, but one that I am loving. I am split between inpatient with adults and outpatient with pediatrics. If you know me well, you know that I hate hospitals and anything that has to do with blood, needles, and basically any bodily fluids. To say I was worried about my weak stomach and the thoughts of the kinds of medically fragile states of potential patients freaked me out would be a severe understatement. My anxiety was doing its best to play tricks on me, but I did everything I could to not dwell on my fears before knowing what it would really be like. I am now three weeks in, and to my great surprise, I love the setting, pace, patients, and variety. I have even gone out on a limb and uttered the words that I would highly consider working in an inpatient setting. This is a complete one-eighty from the tune I was singing before seeing this side of the field. My friends have even teased that I have converted to the dark side. A little back story is that we all have been on the kiddo trajectory and wanted to get our adult placement over with the first semester. My supervisors have been fantastic, and I am learning so much about the medical side of speech-language pathology, and frankly myself too. Our program’s internship coordinator knew this setting was a better fit for me, more so than I did. I am so happy she did not listen to me when I thought I wanted to be placed at a skilled nursing facility. That probably would have been the longest fifteen weeks of my life. She saw something in me that I was not able to see in myself, but I am finding the part in me who loves the hospital and the people in it. It was meant to be that I was placed where I am. The things that have always made my stomach turn somersaults, I run to without a second thought. Nothing is more rewarding than working with a patient who smiles even when they do not feel like it. Making small talk and playing even a small part in their healing process is what it is all about. And I cannot forget about the kiddos. I still have that place in my heart that wants to work with kids, and this aspect of my placement satisfies that desire. I have begun treating part of my supervisor’s caseload, and it has been some of the all-time favorite sessions. When I look back at my sessions back at the clinic, the fifty-five minutes sessions used to feel like they dragged, but now, I have thirty- to forty-five-minute sessions, and they fly by. As unrealistic as it is to customize therapy materials for each client, I enjoy doing it, and a day will come when time will not be on my side to do so. While I can do this, I am going to. Something about laminating and assembling therapy tools is so thrilling for my SLP heart. I used to think I knew exactly what population I wanted to work with and what setting I wanted to work in, but since that time, I have shifted, changed, grown, and repeated the process over and over. I am not sure where I will eventually end up, but one thing for sure is that even in all of my uncertainty, I know I am right where I am supposed to be right now, and wherever the journey takes me, I will embrace every step. Stay Curious, Kayla ©Inquisitive Perspectives 2019
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
July 2019
|