Kathryn T. Transcript
My name’s Kathryn Tuazon and I’m an occupational therapist working in an outpatient hospital system. I first got into occupational therapy after a kind of change in career identity. I went to college first for something completely unrelated, engineering, and decided it really wasn’t fulfilling for me.
Since then, I’ve fallen into the world of OT, and I really love working with the neurological population and find it really meaningful for me and fulfilling to kind of give back. Interact with people who do need help, and seeing kind of improvements there has been very joyful for me since I started this career.
I think originally the reason why I chose engineering to start with was because I am someone who really likes problem solving. I’ve always loved to be very hands-on. I have many hobbies where I’m just kind of creating things from scratch. So for OT, there is a big creative side to it and a lot of problem solving and a lot of opportunities to come up with solutions, come up with adaptive equipment, just kind of to meet a new need every time, so it doesn’t stay dry. It stays new, and it’s always challenging me and meeting me where I want to learn more and want to do better every day. So that’s kind of what I’ve gotten out of it and kind of run with since switching.
I work in a hospital system that does have a high population of stroke survivors, so I work with those individuals. I work with people with Parkinson’s disease, brain injuries, concussions have been much more on the newer side in the last few years, but we are seeing a bigger population there. And I also treat a lot of orthopedic conditions including fractures, hand issues, and literally everything else in between. So we do not discriminate in terms of who comes through our doors. We see everything.
I guess when I say recently, I would say that’s honestly within the last five years or so. Like there’s been an uptick. So maybe when I first started here in 2018, I would get one or two where maybe their deficits weren’t super obvious to be concussion-related. Maybe they were only complaining about visual issues at the time. But since then, we are trying to build a more comprehensive program, so we’re much more in tune with a lot of things like the exercise tolerance, vestibular conditions, so we’re just trying to be much more comprehensive more recently and give as much as we know that these people need in terms of treatment. So not super recent, but I’ve been in this world for a little while for now.
Many people I actually see in my clinic are chronic. They haven’t gotten the right help in years sometimes, and to tell someone that the way that they’ve been pacing things or planning things out or trying to pull back or manage their energy wasn’t optimal to begin with, and sometimes it sounds like you’re asking them to do less than what they want to feel. It’s a hard conversation sometimes because they’re going to feel like they’ve already been doing so much less than what they’re used to. So I try to approach it as: let’s try to figure out a way that allows you to do what you need to do, what you find meaningful, but also learn how to recover and manage your symptoms in a way that allows you to do more over time. It’s kind of a marathon situation versus a sprint. So it’s a lot of workshopping and trying to make things as realistic and simulation-based as possible so people can carry things over versus just feeling like someone telling them to do something they don’t feel like matches what they need to do or what they feel that they need to do.
I think I would like people to understand that they do know their bodies. They are experts on their bodies, but I think it will also be good for people to listen to their bodies and listen to what it’s trying to tell you. So if it’s telling you to pause or to say, maybe I’ll do the same activity another way next time so I don’t feel so bad or so symptomatic after, listen to it. Don’t ignore the signs that your body’s trying to tell you because it’s trying to tell you for your own sake. So just listen to what your body’s telling you and act accordingly so that you can do more over time and just be healthier after that.