More Patience, Less Patients

After all the hype and studying and cramming information about gait into my brain...after working on my presentation and trying to make it sound casual, cute, funny and informative all while seeming natural, confident, and knowledgable (I know, a lot to get across in a 10 minute speech), Mr. R did not show up for my critique appointment today.  Wah wah.  There I was, sitting in a freezing cold training room, staring at parallel bars in my freshly pressed linen pants (sidebar, what is the point in even ironing linen?) and 10:00 came and went with no sign of Mr. R.  The critiques were taking much longer than planned so I was not too worried when there was no sign of him at 10:15am, but by 11:30, it was starting to look a little dicey.  Three phone calls later and it was 3:00 and Mr. R was officially a no-show.  Needless to say, I watched 17 critiques today and no one watched mine.  And everyone else has been able to disassemble their legs and mine is still sitting in one piece on my workbench.  Fingers crossed that someone is able to get ahold of Mr. R and he is able to come into school tomorrow so I can get my critique done and get a grade for this leg that I have spent three weeks working on.  I am chalking his absence up to the fact that yesterday was his 86th birthday and he was obviously out late last night celebrating until the wee hours of the morning :)

Overall, it was a relief to see the critiques happen because the professors hyped them up to be this huge, stressful event that made it seem almost impossible to succeed at, but it was not like that at all.  I actually learned a lot from watching all of these trans-tibial amputees walk in the parallel bars.  I started understanding (and even being able to notice on my own) the different issues with their gait and how to make the adjustments to correct the problem.  During the critiques, no one in the audience is safe.  We were called on all day to make adjustments on other people's patients and I was relieved when I knew what was wrong when I got called on.  I got down on the ground and used my handy-dandy tools to add flexion to a socket and to slide a foot posterior.  A big part of our grade is participation and answering questions aloud during other people's critiques - I think I did really well in that area today.  It is good to know that these critiques are not worth getting so worked up over the night before!

Not much else to report, the entire day was spent watching people walk back and forth across the room.  Tomorrow is a gloriously short day of only 3 hours!!  A 3 hour day at school sounds amazing - the fact that we were told to wear shorts or lycra to get our muscles tested makes me a little nervous.  If you recall, the last time we were testing things on each other, it involved a lot of up close and personal touching of my fellow classmates.  Could make for a very uncomfortable 3 hours...

Here is hoping Mr. R shows up tomorrow (maybe he was confused on the dates) and gets me out of my muscle testing duties :)