My Chicago Pictures

I got my Chicago pictures back from Snapfish. Here's some of the best ones. Enjoy!


Dr. Fidler playing 3-Card Monty



Jen loooooooves CHOCOLATE CAKE!!!


Fun in the Limo with Ed, Gopal, and Jill



MORE CAKE! I told you, the desserts were HUGE!


The Bridgeport Gang by our poster presentation


Ed's getting all fancied up for the banquet


Banquet table arrangement.


Banquet Roses



My Hotel! The Hyatt Regency Chicago.


From Milennium Park onto South Michigan Avenue. You can see the Loop part of the El in the background.


From Chagall's The Four Seasons


The Picasso Sculpture


The Chicago Tribune Building and some perty fancy artchitecture.



Sears Tower from the River


Pretty river vegetated building.



Navy Pier. I didn't get to go there, not enough time. :(


Chicago Skyline from Lake Michigan


On Lake Michigan. Can you tell I was on a rocking boat?!?!?



My Mom will love this one... The slanty topped building in the center, about the 3rd tallest in the picture; Oprah lives on the top floor.


River views


More River Views



Chicago flower gardens!


Pretty flowers closer up!


Flower gardens up Michigan Avenue


Pretty Pretty City Flowers

And that's all folks!

My Birthday Weekend

This past Saturday was my Birthday! :) TEE HEE!

It was a quiet, yet nice day.

It all started with my cake and card at work on Friday, which was really nice of everyone. :) And YUMMY too. MMMMMM CHOOOOCOLAAAAATE!!!!

Saturday was nice. Rob and I went to Shul, and then came home and took a nap. Out Shabbas schluff!! :) Then we took a walk and went for supper. YUMMY Indian food. This is the ONLY good restaurant in Stamford btw...

So it was a nice and quiet and pleasant day. Along with all the phone calls and emails from friends and family. A nice way to celebrate 27 years of life.

Sunday was Stoofie's Graduation from her Masters in Guidance Counseloring at Hofstra University. As usually the ceremony was long and boring, but I'm really proud of Stoofie, she worked REALLY hard and she did well in grad school and now she's free!! YAY!! So we had graduation and dinner and it was fun.

As for gifts, as people ALWAYS inevitably ask, My mom as we all know bought me 2 purses and a watch already, AND she managed to sneak something in, a photo album so I can scrapbook my photos from our SFO/Wine Country/Yosemite trip last October. She's too much. WAY too much. I'm appreciative and I love all my gifts, but it was so much. THANK YOU MOMMY! And Rob got me an iPod. A PINK iPod. He said I'm a girl now with my skirts, and high heels and pocketbooks, so he got me PINK! WOW, what a gift. Which is AWESOME because I've been wanting one, but again SO MUCH! And it makes me feel badly because I can't reciprocate because I have more expenses and make less $$ than he does. But again, I'm happy and appreciative and I can't wait to use it... Except for one thing. Rob's computer is literally in pieces (he took it apart, and is now trying to put it back together again, kinda like Humpty Dumpty, he keeps coming up with extra screws that he took out but can't figure out where to put back in) ANYWAY, so his computer in in pieces, and besides that my computer is virus and spyware ridden and the hard drive needs to be wiped, it runs on Win 98, and you need at least Win 2000 to run the software for the iPod. Oh well. So now I have an AWESOME gift that I can't use...

And that was my Birthday. :) Not too exciting, relaxing, time with Rob, time with family, time in shul, nice and generous gifts, loving friends and family, fun coworkers... Again, a pretty good way to celebrate 27 years of life.

And ROB'S Birthday is Wednesday! He's gonna be 30! :) So on Wednesday go wish him a Happy Birthday to a really wonderful person. :) He's the bestest. At least I think so. TEE HEE!!!

The Newest Member Of My Family

Welcome to my cousins Faith and Seth's brand new daughter

Emma Farrah Kaufman

born on Tuesday May 17th.

Isn't she cute!!!! Tee Hee!!!

YAY!!!!!!!

Chicago

Well, I'm back from Chicago! I had an AMAZING week.

The ABA conference was great. I really truly learned a lot, and picked up a lot of great tips of the trade for treating burns. And it was great to network with other burn therapists. I met one PT from Shriners Children's Hospital in Boston. For those of you who don't know, Shriners is a burns only children's hospital with locations in Boston, Northern CA, Galveston TX, and Cincinnati. They receive children from all over the world with pretty significant burns. They are top of the line in general burn care, even though they specialize for children. We send a lot of our involved pedi burns there. They'll get better care than we can provide them, and it's so close. ANYWAY, so I met a therapist from Shriners in Boston and we got to talking, and she invited me to spend time up there with some of the therapists to learn more. YAY! That's SO exciting! :) So the conference aspect was great, I learned a lot, I got a lot out of it, I met people, it was truly a great experience.

It was also great to spend social time with my co-workers. It was really cool to interact with them on a different level, I haven't done that with a lot of the burn team. Especially with the MD's. We all had a lot of fun. We were taken out to dinner a couple of times, by a wound care company and also by the CT Burn Foundation. Where else in Chicgao but a Steakhouse. What's a veggie to do at a steakhouse!?!?!?! I had a lot of side vegetables for supper. But OH MY GOSH, do CHICAGOANS LIKE TO EAT!!! First of all, regular portion sizes in Chicago are what I've always considered LARGE portions. So large portions in Chicago are GIGUNDO! My asparagus must have grown up near a nuclear power plant they were so huge. You ask for broccoli, you get a WHOLE HEAD of broccoli. The mashed potatoes must have been 4 potatoes in the dish. And the cake... It kept getting bigger every night! It was totally nuts. They were serving 40 and 50 oz steaks. You could have gotten smaller ones but the waiters were waving raw meat at the table, "We don't serve none of that froufrou stuff in NY, this is Chicago and we serve RED MEAT and LOTS OF IT!!!!" I was afraid to ask him what I should order as a vegetarian... When I get my pictures back I'll post them, we took a lot of pics of the huge food. :)

We all had a great time, there was a dance club in the hotel lobby so we were dancing every night, and going out and having fun, never mind that there was a 6:30 AM lecture the next morning... I think I rolled into bed every night from eating so much. It was nuts. But a lot of fun.

As for the pizza, I don't like deep dish. Too heavy, too greasy, and well I got nauseas and threw up that night in the middle of the night after my pizza. So that sealed the deal for me. I like good ole thin crust.

Chicago is a really nice city though. I got to see a good bit of it on my time off. I went to an AMAZING exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry called Body Worlds. All these cadevars preserved using a method called plastification, and WOW, it was truly amazing to see all the details and it was an AWESOME exhibit. If you like dead bodies. Or even if you don't you can truly appreciate the wonders of human anatomy.

I also got to got of he Art Institute which was great. I spent a ton of time staring at all the paintings they had. And I walked around the loop area downtown for awhile and saw some of the sculptures exhibited. I was shocked though, it was Saturday and everything was closed! It took me over an hour to find somewhere to eat. Everything was open Monday-Friday. I was in shock that so little was open on the weekends. And in the theatre district too!

After I found some lunch, I went on a boat tour of the Chicago River and out into Lake Michigan. It was really nice really pretty and really informative. Very cool. Then I walked around Michigan Avenue for awhile and that was my sightseeing day. Pretty good for one day. I loved all the flower gardens in the middle of the streets and sidewalks. It was really nice. The city seemed so clean and large and wide open even downtown. I liked it. Though the wind hurts my ears. And I don't know if I could stand a winter there.

Anyway, it was a great trip. So that's some tidbits of the vacation/conference. I'll get some more specifics when I get my pictures up. But I think that's enough to go on for now. Next year, off to Vegas I go!!! :)

This week

Well, it's 9PM on Sunday night, and in 12 hours I will be on a plane on my way to Chicago! YAY! I'm SO Excited!!!!!

I'm heading off to the annual conference of the American Burn Association. I'm travelling alone, but I'm not going to the conference alone. I'm going with a bunch of peoples from the hospital. Sally the head nurse, I don't think other nurses from the unit are going this year, but Jen a rehab nurse is going, Dr Fidler who's the head honcho in charge of the Burn Unit, Dr. Shah, another attending MD, Gopal our Burn Fellow, John the Burn PA, Ed the OT, Jill the Dietician, and me!! Carie the PT. So it'll be quite a group of peoples and we should have fun. And learn a lot. I'm REALLY looking forward to learning a lot and picking up tips from other PT's treating burn patients.

It'll be a good conference I think. I'm looking forward to it. I love to travel. :) Going to a new city, learning more about treating burns, mingling with burn unit peoples from across the US and Canadia, getting free samples of pens and bath thermometers, and other fun stuff like that, all for free, you can't beat it. :) The CT Burn Foundation is paying all of our expenses, flight, hotel, conference fees, PLUS they're taking us out to dinner one night, so Kudos to them anda BIG Thank You!

So that's where I'll be the rest of this week. I may not get to a puter so if I don't update, you know why. I'll tell you ALLLLL aboot it when I get back on Sunday.

So have a great week all! :) :) :) :) :) :)

Reminiscing

I was thinking about college and all the fun stuff that happened there. YAY for BINGO! And I was thinking about some of the funnier lines. So for those of you who weren't there, please bear with me. For those of you who were there, I hope you enjoy the post, and remember fondly our fun times together at school.

FLYING MONKEYS! DOZENS OF FLYING MONKEYS!!!

Velveeeeeeetaaaaaaa!

How do I say this tactfully. Hmmm, there is no way to say this tactfully. Ari, you go through women like socks.

YOU SCHMUCK! I FELL IN!

Schmuck is a Yiddish word.

WOW Ilana, you really DO look like a cow.

Carie, you have braids in your hair.

PPL, a good Jewish major. You get 3 for the price of one.

I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals, I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants!

Carie's pregnant! No I'm not! Yes you were, you were too drugged to remember, I drugged you. Trust me guys, I'm NOT pregnant. Why? Don't your ovaries work? Ya know, in the middle ages, if your ovaries didn't work they cast you out and killed you. No, my ovaries work fine, that's why I can't be pregnant! (The look on their faces was PRICELESS!)

Carie, you can't be yourself on Shabbas!

Don't call me woman! Why, that's what, you are, what do you want me to call you, girl? Call me by my name. Why? Because I'm not a woman, I'm a Carie, there's a difference.

OH NO!!! Eric, are you ok? Moshe's DEAD! I hate to break it to you Eric, but Moshe's been dead for a few thousand years...

Minyan, minyan, minyan, minyan, minyan....

Tomorrow (Tisha B'Av) is the biggest day of mourning on the Jewish Calandar. But when Moshiach comes, it will be the greatest celebration. So if Moshiach comes between now and sundown, we're going to have a HUGE party tomorrow. But if not, here's the schedule...

Come to Israel with me and be in my Harem.

It's chocolate and banana and they put it on a stick. It's cold and it's frozen and it looks like a CHOCOLATE COVERED FROZEN BANANA!!!!

We're Jews on the move!

And so on and so forth. TEE HEE!!! YAY for Bingoland!

Being a CI

Well, it's been 3 days with my student, and WOW, this is HARD! I expected it to be different and somewhat difficult because I haven't been a clinical instructor (CI) before, but it's actually a lot more work than I thought it would be. It takes a lot more thought and energy than I thought it would. Prep work, research work, scheduling work, evaluation work, and most of all self control work. I want to let her do evals and treats and be the therapist, but I also want her to learn and get help when she needs it. I'm not always sure when to junp in and tell her what to do, or help her, and when to hold myself back and let her do what she needs to do.

Also with documentation, she has trouble putting things into appropriate wording, which comes with time. It took me awhile to be proficient at it even after I had my license. I want her to think and write and get it by herself, but she does need help and sometimes I feel like I'm dictating to her, or rather she asks for a suggestion, I give her an example or "topic" and she'll write what I say word-for-word, instead of taking the suggestion and formulating her own goal, or assessment. So I'm not sure where to draw the line, when to tell her stuff and when to let her think, when to jump in and tell her she's forgotten something and when to let her figure it out on her own.

I know it hasn't even been a week, so it's hard initially to let her take initiative etc. BUT, she's been a PTA for 15 years, in an acute care hospital, so she has a lot of experience (more than me) dealing with patients, treating patients, etc. Part of me feels like I don't have anything to teach her. And part of me sees the trouble with assessments and goals, or even documentation specific enough or assessment enough for a PT rather than a PTA. It's a hard situation to be in.

Like I said, it takes more work that I thought it would, more thought and more self control. All while tring to give her a good, and learning filled/challenging clinical experience.

And WOW does having a student change your productivity! I'm doing like 3 or so evals a DAY, and that's usually a morning for me. It takes a lot longer to write things up, and discuss, and answer questions and teach etc. But that's to be expected I guess.

Sometimes I feel like I'm teaching her bad habits. Like I've fallen into a pattern of generalizing things that are on specific measurement scales, saying min, mod, or severe instead of grade 1, 2, 3, or 4. Or I'll do a gross assessment instead of performing specific tests. But the funny thing is, when I ask all the other therapists, what certain scales were, because she had asked and I had forgotten, they didn't know either. They generalized also. BUT, she needs to know these things for her boards and supposedly to be a good clinician. So I have to really think about the specifics of tests, and measurements etc, instead of making generalizations. Do as I say, and not as I do....

But in a way, it's good, it keeps my own skills sharp, it keeps me on my toes and always learning, it keeps me from getting to complacent and relaxed, it kicks me in the buttocks enough that I realize I still have a lot to learn. ESPECIALLY if I want to end up teaching in PT some day.

So being a CI is a lot of work, but it's fun at the same time. My student is really nice, we get along, we seem to work well together. It's nice to have an extra hand for assistance or a boost when I need it instead of finding a nurse for help. And it's a different experience, and keeps life interesting. So I like it so far. Though it still feels different and kind of weird. But that's ok too. :)

The Madness of FedEx

I ordered a pair of shoes online form Casual Corner. :) The same sandals I got from them in white for my cousins bridal shower, in black. I figured they fit, they were comfortable, they looked good, I needed a pair of black dress sandals, I should just get these. PLUS they were on sale. Sealed the deal.

ANYWAY, So I got an email from Casual Corner today saying my shoes were shipped yesterday and here's my FedEx tracking # if I wanted to track my order.

So I did, curious as to when I'd get my package. I'll probably get them today, but what an out of the way route they took!

They were shipped from Elmsford NY. Elmsford is in Westchester, about a half hour from me in Stamford. But the shoes were first brought to another FedEx facility in Willington CT. Willington is in the Northeast corner of CT, About 2 hours away from me and about 2.5 hours away from Elmsford. They went 2 hundred miles and 4 hours out of their way to ship me my sandals when they could have driven a half hour from Elmsford.

Now I ask you, does this make sense? Why couldn't they ship it to me directly from Elmsford? I'd get the shoes a day earlier, and the company saves $$ on gas, and salary, PLUS they get kudos from me on a quick delivery. No wonder it's so expensive to ship something!

Does anyone know WHY the roundabout route was taken? Because it sure doesn't make sense to me!!!!

Saw this on the bathroom wall too.

"Seatbelts are not as confining as wheelchairs"

SO TRUE!

When I was a student, I had a rotation at The Mount Sinai Medical Center, in their Spinal Cord Injury Rehab Center. And I saw a lot of traumatic spinal cord injuries. And there are different mechanisms, but one main one I saw was MVA without a seatbelt. The other one, Motorcycle accident. Thats a BIGGIE! There were like 4 patients on the unit who were in motorcycle accidents. I will NEVER EVER get on a motorcycle. And I ALWAYS wear my seatbelt, and I make everyone else in mycar wear them too. The care stays parked until all seatbelts are snapped in. 8 weeks ont that unit was enough drill that into me. It's pretty scary what can happen.

So before I get off of my soap box, WEAR YOUR SEATBELTS!!!! I'm not going to say don't ride a motorcycle, (even though I wouldn't ever) but if you do, BE CAREFUL! and WEAR A HELMET! Brain Injuries aren't fun either.


Ok, Down off the soap box.

On another note, will the rain EVER STOP!?!?!?! OY!!!!

Ok, time to finish the laundry and prep for my student tomorrow! YIKES!!! Wish me luck! And give me Chicago tips if you have them! Thanks! BYE BYE!!!! :)