“I intern four days a week at a mental and allied health clinic. One day a week at the mental health side and three days a week at allied health, allied health being physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy. I spend most of my time with occupation and physical therapy. It’s all for children with cognitive disabilities, and physical disabilities for physical therapy that branch from a cognitive problem. I do it through the healthcare program here at Lambert, which I have been in for three years, and that was what I wanted to do from the beginning- that’s why I started the healthcare pathway. That’s what I’d been working for for three years and I finally got it; best day ever. It was exhilarating when I found out I was accepted into the program. I was nervous on my first day because I had already known that I wasn’t going into mental health, even though I had applied for the mental health section, so I was nervous that they were going to ask me questions about things that I didn’t know anything about. They didn’t. It was fine. They didn’t expect me to know anything which is good because I didn’t. Mostly I was excited because i wanted to meet all of the patients

The patient that I saw the most was a child with cerebral palsy. I saw him two days a week. My most memorable experience with him, because he was my favorite patient obviously, was when we had this breakthrough with him in physical therapy. We were trying to get him to crawl and he cannot crawl because he cannot move, so we put him in this tube-thing and we were rocking the tube side to side and he started crawling movements on his own. It was fantastic, we all cried and screamed. It was great because he actually started to crawl and we were like, “This is amazing. He can do this all the time now.” He got himself through the tube on his own which was amazing because he can’t even move three feet on his own on the floor.

My internship has shown me the dedication that healthcare professionals have for their patients. They really love what they do, which, obviously that’s why they’re there. It takes a lot of work to get there so if you didn’t love it, you wouldn’t be there. But they really love what they do. And all of the therapists after they see a patient go and research stuff afterwards or before the session, not clocked hours. They would work off the clock all the time just to better their patients and it was just really cool that they just love their job so much and they love their patients.

Creating relationships with these people and health professionals could potentially get me a job later on because now I can get really good recommendations for different programs or grad school. I’m also interested in physical therapy again so I might look into that more. For me to have been interested in physical therapy and then thought I lost that interest but have so quickly gained it back because of this experience, it’s gotta mean something.”