Journals
These journals reflect my weekly experiences as an athletic training student. Each journal reflects either an actual patient contact experience, or something I am working on in my athletic training courses.
This semester has been one of my favorite semesters since I have been in college. My big concern this semester has been my chemistry class, which is really nice because its not an athletic training class. Right now my only other AT class is gen med, and its really nice to not have many classes to be stressing about. I have had a lot more time to study for my exit since I do not have as many challenging classes. However, my schedule is still very hard, but I could say this semester has been my favorite so far I have also had more time to get my clinical hours in. I really enjoyed being offsite with Bre because I got to experience so many different injuries. It was such a good experience to be in a different environment and with younger athletes. I still need to continue working on reviewing for my exit. I am very, very nervous for this upcoming Saturday. I think I get so nervous that I stress myself way too much which is not ok. I know that I know the material, I just get so nervous I forget to talk normal and just rush through my interview. I am really going to focus on expressing my knowledge throughout this exit because I have been working really hard since the beginning of the semester. I have been reviewing notecards since February. This has been a goal of mine to review as much as I can before I take my exit. I have been separating different body sections in order to allow for less things to review and more time to focus on the actual injury. I also need to start preparing myself to take my GRE and BOC. I am planning on taking my GRE over the summer or early august, so I can apply early to as many school that I am able to. I also just want to get this test out of the way because I need to focus on my senior year. Lastly, I need to start preparing to take my BOC. I know I have test anxiety, so the more practice tests I can take the more confident I will feel in myself when I take the test. I want to continue reviewing my notes since my spring semester of my freshmen year. I feel like sometimes I just memorize terms, and I don’t actually take the time to understand the concept.
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My greatest strengths and weaknesses seem to keep changing each semester since I have been in the program. I believe my biggest weaknesses are modalities and clinical evaluations. I have struggled with modalities since sophomore year. I made a goal in my clinical book for the past year now to become more confident when using modalities. I do feel like I have become more familiar with the concept, but there are times where I am unsure which modality is best for the injury. I have been reviewing my modalities book every Sunday to try and get more confident with the subject. My second weakness is performing a full evaluation. My brain sometimes feels swimming and I begin to mix up my words when I speak. I know what I am talking about, but I have trouble putting it all together. I think this really effects me in my exits because I want to say the most important part of an evaluation, but my brain jumps ahead and wants me to say the most important part of this injury. I was able to improve when I retook my exit because I took my time, and I was able to begin by expressing the history and ending with functional testing. I created flash cards over winter break, and I have been reviewing those once a week. I believe I have gotten better with my evaluation skills, however, I just need to reassure myself to take my time. My greatest strengths include being dedicated and wound care (which I just recently found out about). Being in the program has taught me that I am going to be wrong a lot and its ok. I used to be a perfectionist. Now, I like being wrong because it’s a learning experience to me. Its allowed me to become dedicated because even though I am wrong, I still want to keep trying until I get it right. I consistently reread my notes from classes, and I will keep trying until I get the correct answer. If there isn’t something I know or can do, I will go to the lab and keep trying until I can do it right. Lastly, I just figured out today wound care if one of my strengths. How ironic (because my mom is a wound care nurse)?! Now that I look back over the past semester, I can say I am very confident when dealing with wounds. My favorite sport I have clinical experienced was wrestling because of how much blood I got to work with.
I was able to get 10 attempts and masteries with Bre this week! Throughout this past week I was responsible for making a clinical decision on an athlete with low back pain. The athlete had been seeing Bre previously with this pain while she was cheerleading in the fall, but had not been seen since then. So I had heard about her tight back muscles from Bre before. I first began by evaluating the athlete. My history include that the athlete is currently playing volleyball, and she is practicing 4 days a week. She is a libero, and reports most of her back pain is when she is bending over waiting for a serve or a pass, but no pain when actually passing the ball. She also has muscle spasms randomly in her back. However, she reports no radicular pain. Throughout my evaluation, I first was able to help correct her posture. She had a forward shoulder posture and slumped her back. I explain to her correct posture, which could help relieve some of her pain. Throughout my palpation process, I felt that her paraspinals were very tight bilaterally. Next, she had full lumbar ROM. There was no positive special test. Bre asked me what type of treatment I wanted to do for the athlete, and I chose to perform pre-mod stimulation on her back. I chose this because I wanted to target the pain. I did 0-150 beats frequency for 7 minutes (because that was how long we could be in the clinic before we needed to leave to be present for the soccer game). This experience was really helpful to me because it was in front of an athlete I knew well in high school, so I didn’t want to sound like I had no idea what I was doing. I was also nervous because I wanted to prove to Bre my knowledge. I knew exactly which modality I wanted to use, however, I just needed to get over my stage fright. This did help towards my clinical goal because I was able to run through the back muscles/anatomy, special tests, and performing an evaluation which is one of my goals in my book! Its always helpful to have different kinds of evaluations to perform because I know the more I do the more I learn. Lastly, I was able to get 10 masteries this week.
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Reflective JournalsThese journal entries express my experience as an athletic training student Archives
April 2019
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