Therapy

Happy New Year everyone! Everyone sticking to their New Year's resolutions? I'm not, I don't really make resolutions as such because I never end up keeping them.

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Occupational Therapy

Anyway, today I am going to talk about the types of therapy that I've had over the years. Firstly, there's Occupational Therapy (OT). This is the use of assessment and treatment to develop, recover, or maintain the daily living and work skills of people with a physical, mental, or cognitive disability. My OT was to make sure I had the right equipment that I needed to give me (and my parents) the correct support at school and at home. I received different types of chairs, standing frames, things like that. This also ties in with Physiotherapy (PT), more on PT next.

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Physiotherapy

I have always had (and always will have) physiotherapy, in PT I do routine exercises. These exercises include: leg stretches, putting my knee and hip in a right angle position, and then raise my lower leg up as far I can, I do this three times on both legs. Then I put both of my legs out to the side with them being as straight as possible (I physically cannot straighten my legs fully, my knees are always bent, they tend to flop inwards, towards each other).

Another thing that I do in PT is standing up in a standing frame, it is laying horizontally to begin with, I get hoisted into it, get strapped in so I'm secure(ish), straps on my lower torso, my hips, my knees and feet. Once I'm all strapped in, my frame tilts up into an upright position, but not completely vertical, because I feel like I'm leaning forward if it is. I stand for about 45 minutes to an hour, depending on how uncomfortable I am. I stand once a week.

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Speech and Language

Moving on to Speech and Language Therapy (SALT). When I was little, I didn't have any speech. Speech therapy helped me learn to communicate with others by teaching me how to make different shapes and sounds with my mouth. When I was little, I had a book which had different symbols for different things, I used that book to point (or eye-point) to the symbols to get what I wanted across to people.

I think that's pretty much it for the therapy that I've had during my life so far, but it probably won't be every therapy that I will have.

Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next time.