Anja Bliss

10JUNE2022

Journal 4

Dr. Grossnickle

This week was challenging, but in a way that I wanted. One of my goals for myself was

to refresh my Spanish, so that I could lessen the communication barriers with Latinx patience.

We had a Spanish speaking patient this week who was a high fall risk with no balance. She was a

very small, elderly lady who initially had an ankle impairment. Memorial Hermann has protocol

that requires a MP4 trained translator to be used when working with any non-English speaking

patients. For evaluations and re-evals. When the patient is having a normal visit, there is a

translator on wheels that virtually connects to someone who will translate the dialogue.

That device was really cool but also difficult for the particular patient that I had. I had to

hold onto her gait belt with both hands and drag the translator along with my foot while trying to

communicate with her what I needed her to do. I ended up creating a decent system for it by

putting everything I needed for her next to the long bar. She could hold the bar and await

instruction. I felt like working with her really helped me to recall the Spanish that I learned in

high school, so I was happy to work toward that goal. I could tell that she liked me too and

appreciated my effort because she requested to work with me after that and would tell Heather

that she liked my “special balance exercises” which were just games I made up with cones to

strengthen her balance.

The biggest challenge this week also turned out to be a cool learning experience. I got to

observe a pre-operation evaluation for a woman with some kind of severe upper motor neuron in
her head/neck area. Heather wanted to rule in/out any additional impairments, but it was almost

impossible to because the lady tested positive for every single special test, had universal

weakness, pain with every motion, disc herniations in her low back, and tingling sensations in

her LE to the point where she had scars from digging at them. Her case was incredibly sad and

very hard to not react to. Heather did the best she could with her and then verified that she did in

fact need surgery. Overall, it was scary at first until I considered the opportunity I had getting to

see it.