I don't recommend taking Precor

One more day...time really flies, even when you are counting down the days. This week has gone by pretty fast, but I won't complain by any means. I am going to thoroughly enjoy my day off today. I finished all of my assignments for this clinical last night and turned them in and today I just have to fill out the CPI (clinical performance instrument) for myself, which is never fun, but can be done in a half hour, and get the rest of my paperwork ready to mail in. It's getting hard to believe that just one clinical stands between me and graduation. I better not take it too easy during this next week that I have off. I really need to get my resume perfected, write up some cover letters, and start sending those out. I've also been pretty lazy for the past 2 weeks about studying for boards, and as much as I don't want to, I had really better start reviewing.

Tomorrow a bunch of us are going out for lunch to CiCi's for Sara's and my last day. It should be a good time. I know we are so busy tomorrow though with patients, I find it pretty hard to believe that we are going to have enough time to even take much of a lunch, but we'll see. I also have to go over the CPI with my CI tomorrow, so wish me luck that I actually pass it and do a decent job.

So basically the next time I post, I will be done with the most challenging clinical I have had so far. I will have survived 11 hour days and not seeing daylight for 8 weeks. In the spirit of that, I will leave you with 2 great experiences that I had yesterday. I think God was playing some kind of practical jokes on me since I am getting close to the end of my clinical.

• I was evaluating a patient who had both back pain and knee pain. She said that she first started noticing her knee pain when she "started with the Precor." I thought this was so odd, and basically thought she was crazy, because what kind of medicine causes knee pain? So I let her get through her description of her pain and what makes it better and worse and she tells me that she has "stopped the Precor." So I say, "so since you stopped taking the Precor, you're knee pain has gotten better?" and she just looks at me like I'm an idiot. My CI was sitting in the doorway observing the eval and says "Precor is the namebrand of an Elliptical." haha oh wow, did I feel dumb....but at least we all got a good laugh out of it after the patient left. That's by far my biggest "blonde moment" of any of my clinicals.
• I was calling a young patient and his dad back from the waiting room for the son's initial evaluation. When I bring people back for an initial eval, I always introduce myself to them and explain that I am a student physical therapist working with a physical therapist. So I say, "Hi, I'm Maren. I'm a student physical therapist...blah blah blah." The son doesn't even really care and just walks right by me, but the dad looks at me with a creeped out look on his face and says, "Maren? That's kind of scary! Like the priest in the Exorcist! Oh my gosh!" So, being as how no one has ever associated me with the exorcist before, I just looked at him, smiled, and said, "Yep!" I wanted to be like, "and I have a sister named Reagan" or some sarcastic comment back. So then the dad was acting like he was scared of me the entire time. It made me want to be like, "now at this point in the evaluation is where I usually perform the exorcism" or something. Some people are crazy....But now I am forever going to associate myself with a horror film. Awesome.