I wanted to post something here for quite a while now, just haven’t found the time to. NOW I HAVE! kinda.
So I’ve been doing a bit of volunteering this summer thus far and it’s been a great learning experience. At the moment, I’ve volunteered at East Rehabilitation Center by Kennedy and Finch, Friendly Rehab Clinic by Warden and Finch, and helped out to coach my church’s senior softball team.
East Rehabilitation Center (ERC) & Friendly Rehab Clinic (FRC)
So, I’ve mostly been watching the kinesiologist at ERC help out patients do their exercises and stretches. I really don’t have much to do there, I mostly learn the different exercises and help out once in a while when there’s more than 1 client in the room. ERC has a much larger exercise facility than FRC.
I don’t learn too much from FRC, but it’s been the place where I’ve been applying the lessons learned at ERC. I only started at FRC last week, but I’m already noticing some subtle differences. FRC has a much smaller exercise facility. I am the one in charge of giving out the exercises, so i basically take some exercises from ERC and implement them at FRC haha =P (are the letters confusing?). Because I’m in charge of the room, I can also have more personal time and when i get bored I can head out to the front desk and be with some company haha. Today, the physiotherapist was streaming the world cup while waiting for clients to come so I watched part of the Brazil vs. North Korea match with him.
Lessons learned from both places combined:
1) Client interaction. Most of the clients are from car-crashes. Most clients are also unable to speak English well. So, I’ve been learning to adjust my communication so the clients can understand me better. A lot of them also don’t want to do the exercises so you’ve got to push them to do just a bit more than they want to. The people who don’t want to do exercises are usually those in a lot of pain or really no pain at all (with exceptions). It’s those with moderate amount of pain that do the exercises seriously because they want that annoying pain to go away.
2) Time. It takes time for clients to heal and see the effects of treatment. Some clients have been to the clinic for a year and a half if not more and haven’t been released of their pain yet. It’s encouraging to hear stories of the clients themselves saying stuff like “You think i’m bad now? You should’ve seen me a few months ago! I couldn’t even move!”. They can see their own progress and it makes me happy because I believe it gives them more motivation to come in and do their exercises and actually take them seriously.
Probably got more to list, but I can’t remember them at the moment. Just a lot of insurance stuff that clients have to deal with. The more talkative patients are always fun to listen to. I love the older clients much more than the younger ones because they do their exercises and they also have a lot of experiences to share. Younger clients breeze right through all the exercises because all they want to do is go and it’s really hard to get them to do the exercises well. Finishing the exercises does not mean they did them well.
Softball
It’s been a challenging, but eye-opening experience to be a coach of a softball team from my church. It’s my first time playing in the league so I had a lot to learn. Being very inexperienced, I’m quite thankful for those who help me out – especially my co-coach. Because my co-coach is more experienced than I am, he does a bit more than I do. The only few things I’m able to do is run drills and do a bit of admin work.
Leading-wise, I’ve learned that experience really does pay off. It makes thinking of drills, creating line-ups, and coaching overall just a much easier task to do. I’m still just learning what to do and not to do for the positions that i play. I am thankful though, as I have gained an obscene amount of interest in softball now and how the game is played, the mechanics of throwing, catching, and batting… unfortunately I need it all to go to muscle memory haha.
