MB the OT

For my neuronote I watched a Ted talk called How I'm preparing to get Alzheimers by Alanna Shaikh and I would recommend others to watch this video as well. In this talk Shaikh expresses that her father has Alzheimers and how she is preparing to get it as well since it is hereditary. She has watched her father battle with this disease and has decided to try to prepare if she is diagnosed in the future. She describes three ways she is changing her lifestyle to prepare in case she is diagnosed with Alzheimers. She is changing what she does for fun, working to build her physical strength, and trying to become a better person. She explains that as a caregiver for someone diagnosed with Alzheimers, she was trained to teach them to engage in activities that are familiar, open ended, and hands on. She explained that she normally likes to read and write, but she wouldn't really be able to do that after being diagnosed with Alzheimers. Therefore, she has started learning to enjoy more ha...

For this particular assignment, we were given a case study and a household material and our goal was to come up with the perfect intervention for our assigned client. My client was Dennis who had a stroke on the right side of his brain. He was experiencing barriers that involved visual perception, right/left confusion and left neglect, poor attention span, insight, and judgement, poor safety awareness, impaired sensation for light touch, impaired stereognosis, weakness in left upper and lower extremity, poor dynamic sitting and standing balance, weak finger flexion and extension, and his gross and fine motor coordination on his left side was impaired. The most significant thing I learned from this assignment was to focus on the client’s interests and decide on a general activity for my intervention. Then, I was able to manipulate that intervention idea in different ways so it incorporated more of my clients barriers. When I first heard about this assignment I didn’t really know how I ...

For my neuronote I read the book Until I Say Good-Bye by Susan Spencer-Wendel. I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn more about ALS. Until I Say Good-Bye is about a woman who is married with three children and finds out that she has ALS. One day she has to face reality and realize that she only has a year to live. When she received this horrible news, she decided that she was not going to let her diagnosis of ALS stop her from having a great final year with her family. She decided to take a special trip with each of her children so they would have something special to remember when she was gone. She spent a lot of her final year traveling to many different places, and she made the accommodations at each destination to still enjoy herself despite the odds she was facing. She knew that she wanted to live her final year with joy and happiness, and that is exactly what she set out to do. This book helped to further my learning about ALS because the author was so meticulo...

For my neuronote I watched a Ted talk by Danielle Valenti called Facing Death Full of Life and I highly recommend for others to watch it as well. I chose this topic because I wanted to learn more about Huntington’s Disease from someone’s personal experience and the title of the video had a very powerful meaning to me.  Danielle spoke about her mom who was diagnosed with Huntington’s Disease and her reaction to seeing her mom change throughout her journey with Huntington’s. Her mom eventually decided that she didn’t want to eat anymore, and she thought that was the best for her daughter. Her mother didn’t want her daughter to worry about having to take care of her as her disease progressed. She also spoke about how Huntington’s was a genetic disease with no cure and about how she spent time wondering if she had the disorder as well. It is known that with a disease like Huntington’s there is a fifty percent chance that it will be passed down to their children.  She de...