Greetings to you all on this October day! I hope this letter finds you well! I'll begin this letter with a situation that presented itself to me recently. What does a healthcare provider do when a person is carried into their clinic, by two friends, because their back pain is too excruciating for them to walk? All I can tell you is what happened in our office. This very situation occurred on a Friday morning and I have to admit, I was wondering why this patient chose to come to our clinic instead of straight to the emergency room.
As I took his history, he informed me that this had happened to him five years earlier. He also shared that he had ended up in the waiting room of the hospital for two hours and had a terribly long and pain filled night. He went home medicated and eventually ended up in our clinic and thankfully avoided back surgery. Fast forward five years, this time he wanted to skip the hospital and come directly to us, with the hope we could help him, at least to get back on his feet and walking.
To make a long story short, there was no quick answer. The average patient is in our clinic for 60-80 minutes per visit. This was not the average patient, and even though I had other patients, this patient ended up in our clinic for six hours! His friends left him in our trusted care and his wife returned six hours later to watch him successfully walk out on a walker, after evaluation and treatment.
We are not officially open on weekends, but for unusually painful back and neck patients we try our best to accommodate our patients as we know their pain can be debilitating. With that in mind I brought him back in on Saturday and Sunday. By Sunday he could walk and was 80% pain free. This patient was unusual as he did bounce back much more quickly than I anticipated, with proper treatment and direction. He was not allowed to pay golf for another three weeks because it did take those three weeks to be completely free of pain.
This is yet another example of an average day in a privately owned physical therapy practice. We are not owned by a big company or hospital. We always answer our phones, we bring every patient in on time, and we go the extra mile to help (whether seeing patients on Saturday and/or Sunday or as late as 7:00 pm). We try to touch each and every patient's life by treating them in a timely manner and respecting their most precious gift of time. We want our patients to know and truly feel that they are special. We want them to expect to be treated in a sensitive and timely fashion wherever they go for their healthcare.
That's my latest story about a patient's experience. We are so thankful that this patient believed in us enough during this vulnerable time in his life. We are so incredibly thankful to ALL our patients who have chosen, over the last 28 years, to choose McDonald Physical Therapy when they are most in need.
Enjoy,
