First Day at Cleveland Clinic

Today I started my placement at Cleveland Clinic. After a pretty decent commute (thank goodness the rain held out!) I was able to easily find parking and headed to the A building. Four new OT students -including me- started on main campus today. We went on a walk to get our ID badges (and when I saw walk - I mean WALK - it's a big place). We luckily got there right before a group of med students. My ID is quite possibly the most serious ID badge I've ever seen.

Not an awesome picture of me - but it is my parking pass to park right near my building, so it's just fine. After getting our badges we walked over to M72 (the Acute Care OT/PT gym/clinic area - the letter is the building, the first number is the floor, and the 2nd number is the desk number - which is a helpful system to know when trying to find other places).
The fieldwork coordinator paged my supervisor to find her and she called saying I could go meet her in a patient room and start right in. So I did!
My first and only patient encounter of the day was a knee patient... I didn't even know you could totally have your knee removed and have a spacer put in until you're ready for a knee replacement (if you have an infection or need to heal more before the actual replacement). As a department we co-treat with the PT staff quite often, especially for evaluations. This helps avoid having to get patients out of bed twice and decreases the amount of patients who decline therapy due to pain or fatigue. 
After the evaluation, my supervisor (Joy) and I went back into the office to document the eval. I got my first experience working with the on-line documentation program. Everything at Cleveland Clinic uses on-line documentation, which is really great since we can see any patient's chart no matter where we are in the hospital. We can also check out patient history from other admittances. The system is kind of difficult to get used to using, but I think overall it will be useful for me.
After lunch the other acute care OT student and I got a tour from a rehab tech (there are 3 and they are really helpful!). We toured the whole main campus - well, all of the connected buildings. Since it was raining we did skip one. The tour was about an hour and 1/2, and I'm not sure I could find anything again. The good news is - there are people who work there and their main job is to help people find where they're looking to find. They have on red jackets so they are easy to find - and if you're standing around looking lost, they check with you to see if you need help. So, when I do get lost, at least I know how to become un-lost again.

I spent the rest of the afternoon documenting and learning the computer system. I am excited to have my own log-ins to everything since at my last sites I didn't get my own documentation log-ins. 

I got a great schedule of exactly what I need to do each week, so I will be able to know where I stand before my evals come up. Tomorrow I have more orientation to go through (safety and such). Today was absolutely exhausting, but I'm happy with my placement. I can't wait to crawl into bed tonight and get a good night of sleep so I can start it all over again tomorrow :)