Working on Benny's hip
The doctors in the pediatric rheumatology department asked me to come spend some time in the clinic on Wednesday mornings; they liked the idea of having an occupational therapist there to see patients with them and to provide some direct assessment and intervention. I did a lot of measurement to monitor the mobility of little hips and knees and elbows and wrists and fingers. The one thing that I noticed about most of the children is that they were used to pain and they often didn’t say when something was hurting them. They were so accustomed to the sensation of pain that you often wouldn’t know they were hurting until you would see a glistening in the eye, or even worse, a stray tear escaping and rolling down a little cheek. When I would ask a child why they didn’t tell me that they were hurting, I would often hear “But it always hurts.” This is why working with children who have arthritis is often like taking a crash course in sensitivity training. Although the children all had indiv