"medically necessary"

Welcome Medical Mondays Hoppers!

My medical world connection recently got cut in half.  Update one week later: I am doing great!  I love him, I can honestly say I do, but it just feels so good to have the burden of long-distance-dating a third year med student (just starting surgery) with a stressful personal life and trust issues... lifted.  I feel free, and it definitely feels right.  Could we end up back together.....? I mean sure... but I am just not even considering it an option right now.  Because the clarity and sureness and exactness of "over" just feels so good.  No wondering, no questioning, so second-guessing.... like, ever. Taylor Swift and Kelly Clarkson are on repeat in my head.....

I did wonder a little bit about whether I still wanted to link up with medical mondays... after all it was because of that relationship that I stumbled upon some of you bloggers and this group and found so many of them interesting, and relatable and comforting to get through the hard times of being on the SO side.  I linked up so I would be sure not to miss anything..... and now I'm hooked.

While my work is medical-related, it's not blood/needles/discovery channel medical.... is it still medical? I'll let you all decide...

I'm an occupational therapist.  I get to wear nice, cute clothes to work and I get to take my time, stop and have a lot of conversations with really interesting people... but I also sometimes get pee/poop on my clothes/shoes, am in a hurry all the time to meet productivity quotas, and can only take so much story-telling.

I travel from an independent-living retirement community to a dementia/memory-support unit for folks with advanced Alzheimer's to a low-income assisted living facility to a skilled nursing center treating people from ages 50-something to 103.

I go from physically assisting a person to clean themselves after going to the bathroom, to training a lady how to use a power wheelchair when cooking a meal in her house, to engaging a resident with dementia in a craft project to curb their agitation, to teaching thera-band exercises and drawing stick figures on handouts so people can do them on their own, to measuring range of motion of every finger of the hand, to teaching a CNA the best way to help a non-ambulatory resident get into their shower, to enforcing hip or weight-bearing precautions following an ortho surgery.

My personality, tools, plan, and schedule changes every 45 to 60 minutes for 8 hours a day. I have to be articulate, detailed, and professional-sounding, and then I have to be simple, friendly, and personable so that people will understand what I'm saying.  I need to be assertive enough that other staff and professionals will listen to me, but I have to be approachable enough so I don't come off as cocky.

I have to be organized, systematic, logical, analytical, detail-oriented and critical... and I have to be creative, flexible, think on my feet, and ready to come up with an activity idea or change my plan at the very last minute.  I teach and instruct and educate and plan for a patient not to fall... but I have to be ready in a split second to catch them if and when they do go down.

On the evaluations, notes, reports and discharge summaries that I write (and write and write), there are always categories and questions relating to the "medical necessity" of the services I provide.  My creative mind mixed with my impatience for typing a lot of information makes me really good at quickly coming up with reasons for justifying 10 minutes I spent counseling a daughter on her father's transition to assisted living, or why it's meaningful for me to help the "pleasantly demented" lady to get to go to the sing-along (since she otherwise wouldn't know how to get there even though it's two doors down).  I get to justify why exercising all your fingers and squeezing putty is essential to a person being independent to brush their teeth or open their pill bottle... and I explain why installing a bed-rail to a person's bed is an essential that improves their quality of life.

Do you do anything in your life that is meaningful or matters to you?  What if you couldn't?  And what would all the medical stuff mean if the important (and some not-so-important) things you do every day still weren't achievable?  What if you got your hip replaced but still couldn't figure out how to put on your pants?  What if your doctor prescribed you medications that then kept you from being able to drive your car anymore?  What if you survived a stroke thanks to the miracles of medicine, but you had to depend on a caregiver to do everything for you?  Or would you?  With OT... maybe all those "couldn't"s would be "can"s and "do"s.

Are occupational therapists medically necessary?  I think you know my answer...