We had an awesome Friday at clinic to finish up our first week here in Nicaragua. It also was International Women's Day which is highly celebrated here, with many businesses even closing at midday to celebrate. All the groups had another successful day at clinic followed by a trip to the Masaya Markets to do some shopping. Today we are highlighting Aldo Chavarria In Patient Group!
Our group hit the ground running on Monday! Our clinic is similar to a InPatient Rehab center. We are seeing a majority of post-stroke patients, some spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury, and other neurological disorders or injuries.
We have been bringing functional mobility back into theses patient's lives. We spent this entire week treating patients and next week our plan is to educate the families and the physical therapists that work there through inservices and other activities.
We have been able to bring our Neuro skills including outcome measures, neurodevelopmental rehab, and functional mobility skills. For some of us this was our first time working through some of these skills with patients, one of us even ran a FULL ASIA Spinal Cord Injury exam on a patient! We have also been using TENS (electrical stimulation) for stroke patients with shoulder subluxation and it has been wildly successful! One patient came in the next day and was able to open his hand and move his arm in synergy patterns!
Overall we have been truly enjoying our time here and love working with our patients. We get to see them make functional gains, work hard, and most importantly smile. We look forward to all the work we will be able to do next week.