Summer is here, which means it’s time to DIVE IN!
Just like the water might be cold when you first get in, it’s crucial to embrace the discomfort & challenges that come with cancer rehab if you’re ever going to get better at treating oncology patients.
So are you going to just dip your toes in? Or are you going all in on yourself & for your patients?
There’s two ways to get in a pool:
You can gently dip your toes in, then gradually lower your body in – which is SLOW & the shock of the cold water lasts a lot longer.
Or, you can dive right & just get started already.
And any experienced swimmer will tell you it sucks for the first lap or so, but then you find your rhythm.
So the lesson? DIVE IN. Get started already! Embrace the suck!
Especially when you’re new in OncoPT, the suck is inevitable. It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be challenging. You are going to feel frustrated, stuck, lost, alone, confused, & unsure of what you’re supposed to do & how you’re supposed to help patients with cancer.
That is unavoidable. But you can accelerate your way through the suck. Here’s how:
When you spend time in the suck, the challenges, the trenches, you learn about why things are hard, what makes them difficult, & how to fix things, how to make things less challenging, such as the impairments, diagnoses, interventions, & more that go into OncoPT.
You learn ways to move through the suck (not out, but through).
Pattern recognition comes from more repetitions over time.
In swimming, the more strokes/repetitions you put in, the better you get at swimming. This looks like increased breath holding time, less strokes per distance covered, improved kicking technique, & faster overall swim times.
The same goes for OncoPT.
The more evaluations that you get through, the more time you spend learning about diagnoses, side effects, & impairments, the easier you will move through them.
Quality repetitions require intention & reflection.
Repetitions aren’t the only thing that make for an expert. Reflection & intention are crucial for quality repetitions.
Swimming endlessly without thought or reflection is a quick path to injury.
But when you intentionally reflect on the repetitions (swim strokes), you can even develop the ability to tell when you need to fix your stroke to avoid injury.
In OncoPT, this looks like avoiding an intervention you would normally select for a particular patient population because you can tell it will not work for your patient.
Example: I like to incorporate lots of resistance training to build muscular strength & endurance for my patients after cancer treatment. But if my patient has a symptomatic bony metastasis in their femur, I am going to change my intervention plan.
And while maybe this modification would have taken soooo much planning when I first started, I can now easily pivot because I have experience with this patient population & LEARNED from reflecting on previous patient encounters what will work the best.
The faster you move through “the suck” with intention & reflection, the faster you get to be DONE.
In swimming, the faster you finish the workout, the faster you get to go home. But there are definitely hard workouts that will take you longer to finish. There were definitely days in the beginning when I was the last one out of the pool because it took me that long to finish the workout.
There will be long days in OncoPT, especially at the beginning. But you shouldn’t have long days forever.
To move through the long days, you have to reflect intentionally. This means reviewing patient interactions from that day, that week. Asking what you would change or adapt now that you have more information. Then implement that tomorrow, reassess, & refine as you go.
When you’re able to move through your days more easily, that means you get to finish your work day sooner.
This is especially important now because summer is here. You have big plans with friends & family, as you should! I want that for you, & your patients want that for you.
The biggest way to accelerate through OncoPT challenges is by case reflection.
One of the biggest ways I accelerated my time through the suck was by reflecting on patient cases, this one in particular:
I was treating a man in his mid-60s diagnosed with multiple myeloma. He had a lot going on, but he was most concerned about his upcoming hematopoietic stem cell transplant. He was actually my first patient that I saw pre-HSCT, so I was pretty pumped about this unconventional prehab opportunity. He made a ton of progress, eventually reaching his functional goals, but not without some adverse events along the way (I’m looking at you DVT & new pathologic fracture).
And it was totally by looking back at these bumps along the way that made me really consider what I was doing, WHY I chose to do those things, & what I would change looking back on it. This reflection process set me on the path to becoming the clinician I am today, which is why I’m such a proponent for case report writing.
Writing a case report is what absolutely set me on the path to becoming a specialist & emerging expert in OncoPT.
And you totally have a case report inside you too.
Ready to implement this in your own OncoPT career?
Writing your oncology case report is a huge undertaking.
And it’s easy to make silly mistakes that can derail your entire writing process.
That’s why you need my brand new FREE masterclass: The 3 Step Framework for a Finished Case Report
Save your seat at TheOncoPT.com/framework ➡️
Watch the FREE masterclass today!
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