Functional Friday: #OTwithRP

Hi everyone!

If you’ve made it to reading my second ever blog post- thank you!! It means the world to me that people are supporting this wild idea I had to combine my personal experience with Retinitis Pigmentosa and my love of Occupational Therapy.

I love being an Occupational Therapist and I’m so grateful for my career but hate having to constantly explain what an OT actually does. If I had a dollar for every time a client told me “Honey, I’m already retired” or “I don’t need a job,” I could start to pay off that boatload of student loan debt I mentioned in my first post!

For my first Functional Friday, I thought I’d share with you a little more on what Occupational Therapy actually is and the journey that brought me to this profession!

When I graduated high school, I went to a small private college thinking I wanted to be a Physical Therapist. Seems pretty close to Occupational Therapy, right? Well, you’d think. I; however, took the “long way ‘round.” My advisor thought it was best for me to major in Biology and there I sat in my first ever biology class, staring blankly into a microscope. I looked in it for a solid 45 minutes and could not find anything on that darn plant slide (at this point, it wasn’t RP’s fault, just user error). I was so frustrated that I just got up and left lab. Fast-forward a few weeks, I failed the midterm and dropped the class. I changed my major that same week and two other times after that… including a brief stent as a Law Major (ha! I’m the least opinionated person ever…not a good fit for me).

I finally ended up declaring a major in Psychology where I thrived. I loved psychology, deciding I wanted to be a school counselor and subsequently completing an internship at a local middle school. I loved it at first but quickly realized it wasn’t for me when I was in our office one afternoon explaining to a 13 year old girl why it wasn’t okay to take a lunch tray to the back of another girl’s head. Lord, help me!

There I was, a graduating senior with NO clue what I wanted to do and very few job leads with a B.A. in Psychology. Several emotional breakdowns and career counseling appointments later, my advisor asked if I had ever thought about Occupational Therapy. Y’all, I had no clue what OT was… I went home that night and researched it and it thought, Whoa! We’ve been adapting and modifying things my entire life to help my mom be more independent…this is what OT is!? From then on, I knew that's what I wanted to do with my life; I felt like it was my calling.

I decided to take a year off and complete my pre-requisites, take my GRE, and work. I was a server, a substitute teacher, and a high school cheerleading coach… I learned a lot that year even through I wasn’t in school. Thankfully, I got into OT school the first time around, despite being told by an old high school teacher that I should “look into doing something else because OT school is just really hard to get into.” I even had a OT program director tell me that I should go back to school to get an “easier Master’s Degree first and then re-apply” because my GPA “just wasn’t quite strong enough.” So here I am, five years later, working as an Occupational Therapist where I have the opportunity to positively impact people’s lives and pursuing my low vision graduate certificate at the University of Alabama-Birmingham.

For those of you who may not be familiar with Occupational Therapy, it is this wonderful profession where clinicians have the opportunity to work with a variety of people, young and old, to help them begin, continue, or regain participation in meaningful activities (we call them occupations). Typically, when people hear the word “occupation” they think, “what do you do for a living?” Occupational Therapists ask “what do you do while you’re living?” The word “occupation” to us is how someone occupies his or her day. These occupations can be anything: dressing, cooking, laundry, medication management, reading, crafting, running, golfing, and even sleep (my favorite occupation!). We look at the physical, cognitive, emotional, social, and environmental aspects of these tasks and figure out how to help our clients engage in their chosen occupations with increased success.

One of my favorite quotes about occupational therapy is that OT gives you “skills for the job of living.” As you can imagine, living with vision loss can significantly impact the way someone is able to complete the job of living. I’ve seen it first hand as my mom has progressively lost her sight over the last 30 years of my life. I’ve also seen how amazing it is for her to regain the ability to complete a task with some simple modifications. That’s why I love Occupational Therapy and that’s why I’m so excited to start this blog.

Functional Fridays will have little life hacks to make living with vision loss easier. I’ll be talking about everything from making coffee, to pet-care, to putting on make-up! As I move forward with these posts, I do ask one thing. Please remember that while I am an Occupational Therapist, I am not your Occupational Therapist. These tips are extremely generalized and oftentimes, what works for one person will not work for another. Please keep that in mind and always consult your primary care physician for an Occupational Therapy referral.

“See” you next Friday!

For more information about my awesome profession, please visit www.aota.org .

**Audio version will be added this afternoon**