Easing Back Into It

Someone is smiling down on me and giving me an easy start to getting back into school...well, minus the two online quizzes that I have to take this evening :)  But when I checked the schedule last night (thankfully), I saw that we had a 9:30am late start today...amazing news after I have been sleeping in for the last 5 days!  I got to school and the only plan before lunch was for everyone to modify the casts that they had made last week - since I was not here to make the cast, I had nothing to modify.  I was able to hang out for about an hour and then go run a couple of errands before coming back to school in the afternoon.

So, this is what putting someone into the jig for measuring and casting and fitting a trans femoral socket looks like.  Comfortable, right??  We spent the first two hours of the afternoon doing critique over the quadrilateral sockets that my classmates made last week.  It was a good learning experience for me to see the problems they encountered and what they had made, but I still feel like I will have no clue what I am doing when I have to actually cast someone.  I do not think that we use this actual casting technique on our patients so it may not be something I do again until I am in residency.  I felt a few ischiums today and got to experience a bit of what I missed out on last week, but for the most part, it was a really easy day for me.  Tomorrow we are casting each other in these same type of jibs for what is called an 'ischial containment' socket.  It is pretty self explanatory, a little more up in your business than these quad sockets.  I am relieved that we are casting each other tomorrow so I will get at least one practice run before having to use an actual patient.  We will then do the modifying and critique on these sockets just the way it was done today.

In other news, it was Horace's birthday today and someone was thoughtful enough to bring him a cake!!

Looking forward to casting tomorrow - it has been a while since I have played with plaster and it always makes the weeks go by faster when we are busy doing things as opposed to sitting in lecture.  Speaking of lecture, I have to go take a quiz that was covered in the lectures I missed last week...should make it a bit more of a challenge :)