Whilst on my neuro placement I have been involved with my peers in supervising patients whilst they participate in the ‘running class’. This service is for people who have aquired a UMN lesion and the participants are quite young, younger then you would expect.
Anyway I have been working with a young lady the last 3 weeks supervising her whilst she engages in the exercises a lot of which involve high level balance ++, mobility ++ and co-ordination. She is obviously scared about performing some of the exercises and I have had to encourage her in regards to trying new exercises and performing some of the other ones without holding on for support (whilst jumping on a mini trampoline) or not staying in the parallel bars.
I have seen her progress and become more confident in her abilities just in this short space of time and it has been really great to see the smile on her face when I tell her how good she is performing.
The other day I was trying to encourage her to perform some bounding type exercises. She started to get all teary eyed and I could see she was scared and disappointed in her self as she didn’t want to try them. She probably just didn’t feel she was ready for such an activity. I reminded her of the gains she had made just recently and the disappointment vanished off her face and the tears were wiped away, to be replaced by a smile. She knew she was improving then.
I feel this experience has highlighted the importance of motivating our patients but also knowing when to back off, I wasn’t going over board with my encouragement I was basing it on what I knew she could do. She didn’t feel she was ready so I wasn’t going to push the issue.
I believe encouragement goes along way and I will always be that kind of therapist because it makes me happy when I see the improvement that has resulted from my intervention (s). She needed further encouragement that day to take the next step and I hope she does with the help of another therapist who can inspire her.
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