Thoughts from OT school

Gonna put down some school related thoughts (semi-inspired by A) while I procrastinate finishing this paper…

Today was a good school day, like a heart “aha!” day. It helped because I was in the building until 6pm tonight, so the three hours of class going by quickly was nice. For OT Practice, they brought in two panels of clinicians from the community practicing in lots of different areas: ortho, behavioural neurology, medical legal, peds, community health, mental health, community mental health…etc. They basically told us one-by-one about their practice areas, contexts of practice and what they loved about their jobs/what was challenging.

There were some that were not as interesting to me, but the ones that were were really interesting. One of the OTs had left her job in an acute care hospital to work at Four Villages Community Health Centre in the west end of the city. She talked about how she took a significant pay cut, but she reminds herself that she loves her job and working in community health is her passion, and that’s why she does it every day. She also talked a lot about how they see a lot of people who are uninsured, on ODSP, or are new immigrants at her CHC, and how she loves meeting people where they are and getting to know them in the context of their community. I’m drawn to the concept of CHCs. I like what they do and the services they provide, but I’m not 100% sure how much I will like the practice environment – way less team based than in a hospital, slower, more group work, a lot of independent work.

Two other OTs also spent some time talking about mental health. I think this is an area I’m really curious about, mostly because of working in dual diagnosis in Kingston, but I’m not sure if I would be very good at it. The one was working in a community mental health program out of Sunnybrook and really advocated for more funding going toward mental health services. She did a quick class survey and asked us how many people knew someone who had had cancer and how many knew someone who had had a mental health issue. The majority of people raised their hands for both, but she went on to point out that the funding for research and clinical care for both is significantly different. Mental health just doesn’t have the celeb sex-appeal as cancer does (not to take away from it), which is so unfortunate because it is just as pervasive.

The other OT who spoke about this was probably the one who really left an impression on me. He worked with patients with schizophrenia at CAMH and spent most of his 5 minutes telling us about a client with whom he had developed a memory aid for by taking pictures of a specific travel route so the client could remember how to get to/from appointments, work, and eventually to see his family. It was less about his intervention than it was about the way he talked about it that did it for me. He was so passionate, so genuinely interested in what was important to his client, and so akin to the idiosyncrasy of meaning… He finished by saying that he loved what he did because no day was similar, every day had a different meaning and that getting to know clients relationally over time was a true privilege.

Annnnnnnd my heart melted.

I’ll leave you with something we discussed in class not too long ago that I was reminded of when I listened to CAMH OT speak. Our prof gave us this question to think about: Would you rather live to be 100 and stay in a bed all day everyday? Or live to 40 and be able to do anything and everything you want to do? Is our ultimate goal to just be healthy? Or is health a resource for every day life?

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