Hello Everyone!
My name is Francesca Cicchetti and I will be IIOP’s new blogger for this semester and I am so excited to share with you all that we have been up to! We hit the ground running since the first day of this semester, so I am a little behind on sharing our progress. So now that I have a moment to catch my breath, let’s catch up on everything we’ve done, shall we…
This summer I had the amazing opportunity to “Zoom” my classmates and other students in the country my clinical experience at POA in Orlando, FL. It was an amazing time! We were able to interview patients, practitioners and also had the opportunity to observe various in-house fabrications and other projects in the lab!! Since I was nominated for an Oscar for my fine performance, I decided to continue it, here.
Our first week back we started on our ground reaction ankle foot orthoses (GRAFOs for short). It was AMAZING!! It was so wonderful to be able to be back together and in the lab after a long few months of quarantine… I really missed my pals. That week we also had the opportunity to get to know our newest cohort with a hotdog social! Food AND new friends?! What more could we want?! They are absolutely a wonderful group of students and I know they are going to make the finest Orthotists and Prosthetists one day.
So, fast-forward to now, these past few days we have been working on our knee ankle foot orthoses (KAFOs for short). We casted our patients (each other), filled our casts, modified our molds, and pulled our plastic. Then today we did some metal bending for our knee joints and uprights. Something we’ve honestly been dreading for the past few days. And I am proud to report that no tears and only sweat was shed! We will be finishing up our projects and fitting them later on this week. Stay tuned for more pictures and posts to come, I cannot wait to share with you all our semester. Happy Wednesday everyone!
Signing off for now,
Fran
