Makeshift Pants and Making Posterior Brims

I am posting the exciting portion of the day.  The first four hours were spent in lecture - learning about ischial containment socket designs and how to draw out socket patterns on paper to use in helping make modifications.  I have to tell you, it does not matter how many hours of sleep I get the night before - I always really struggle to sit through a 4 hour lecture.  Luckily, the afternoon was casting and moving around so I managed to perk up after lunch.  We watched Mark perform an ischial containment casting on a patient model today...we will be doing these castings on our own patients tomorrow.  I thought we were going to get a little more practice this week, but it looks like we are being thrown to the wolves :)

After Mark showed us what we were going to be doing, we all donned stockinette pants and casted each other, trying to feel out the ischium and capture that into the plaster cast.  This was so much harder than it looked when Mark did it!!  You feel as though you are literally cramming your hand and fingers deep into the upper thigh of the person you are casting and sitting there holding that position for the 6 or 7 minutes until the plaster dries causes quite the hand cramp!!  I am so glad that I got to at least get my first shot at it on Erin....who was an excellent patient and very forgiving and understanding regarding my fumbling hands.

Pretty attractive pants huh??  We literally took a big nylon stockinette and cut it up and the middle and sewed a seam to create leg holes.  I had to sew 4 of these for my patient tomorrow - we layer them up with two paris of pants per casting so their undergarments do not get dirty and we are supposed to make two casts each tomorrow.

This is Michelle casting me...notice the look of pain on her face while she is trying to get a good grasp on my ischium.  This was a few minutes in and I believe she had reached the point of the hand cramp...

This is just to give you a good idea of what the training room looked like this afternoon.  Now you can see what I mean when I talk about how you have to really get up close and person with your trans femoral patients when creating their sockets.  Looks fun, right??

Ta da!!  My completed ischial containment socket for Erin!  Sadly, this is as far as this socket is going to go - we are not filling the molds or making any sort of check socket.  This was just a quick hour practice at the end of the day to get a feel (quite literally) for how to make this type of cast.  It was nice to be able to cast again and get dirty and make something...I feel like it has been a couple of weeks of review and testing and not enough plaster!!  Tomorrow we have patients until lunch - we will each be doing two casts on our patients and then spending the afternoon modifying the molds.  I am sure the week is about to get crazy, we were told to be prepared for some upcoming long days in the work room.  I am looking forward to really starting trans femoral tomorrow and meeting my new patient and giving my first above the knee socket and leg a go!!  More ischiums and stockinette pants to come in the next few days... :)