What do you get when you have a roll of tape, a book about muscles, a goniometer (not that that is a big clue since I had never heard that word until last week) and a flat table to lie on?? Range of motion testing!! Partner up kids, it is time to palpitate on your classmate and find all of their nooks and crannies. Today was 7 solid hours of Biomechanics and Gait lecturing. That is a lot of information on walking, how people walk, how they should walk and what makes them capable or incapable of walking. And that was just the Gait portion. The Biomechanics of it all is where the masking tape and prodding came into play.
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| Dan and Sarah working on their upper extremity points. |
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| Erin finding Horace's olecranon something or other :) |
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| Taylor and Salim clearly enjoying their time palpitating. |
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| Me and Erin locating lower extremity areas like pros. I think barefoot is normal office protocol, right? |
For the most part, finding all of these grooves and bony parts of each other's bodies was not a big deal. Then we had to find the ischial tuberosity that is located on the bottom of the ischium bone. For those of you are not sure where this is located, it is the bone that you feel on the top underside of your thigh when you are sitting down. The one that is all up in your business. I think our instructor traumatized every male in the class today when he snapped on his gloves and said he needed a volunteer to come and put his hands on the table in front of him so he could show us how we are to find the bone. Needless to say, locating someone's ischium is a very personal and intimate experience and frankly, a little bit awkward to do on someone you have merely been sitting next to while taking notes for the last few weeks. Hello, nice to meet you, please do not mind the hand that I am running up the back of your inner thigh... After marking all of the spots, we then took the goniometer (it is basically an angle finder) and measured the range of motion (the angle to which a person can flex or extend a joint) on various joints in the body. These are really important to test when making a specific device for someone because it tells you how far the device needs to compensate for someone who can fully extend their leg versus someone who has an extension contracture. Plus, it was interesting to see what a full range of motion is supposed to be and how limited even those of us who are able-bodies are in some areas.
The other big thing that happened today was that I cut out my test socket!! I was able to draw the trim lines and use the cast cutting saw to get my rough cut of my socket made. The cast cutting saw still intimidates me, but I am learning that it cannot actually cut me...despite the whirring blade that runs awfully close to my fingers. The hardest part of the whole process was actually once I had the cuts made and the socket trimmed out. You are looking down at what looks like your test socket, but it is still filled with hard plaster and has a metal pipe sticking out of the top. There is no fancy trick to getting that plaster out, it just simply involves a hammer and lots and lots of banging on the pipe. The fear of breaking the plastic socket was so driven into me yesterday that I was not doing much more than tapping the pipe with my hammer. I would have been there all afternoon working with my chisel and hammer, chipping slowly away. Thankfully that did not happen and I had a few extra hands to help bang out and break up the plaster.
Victory!! A check socket that simply needs a little washing out and some smoothing around the rough edges. And hopefully a little beginner's luck in the initial fitting next week.
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