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The Spark

Writer's picture: SerendipityPTWSerendipityPTW


Back in my graduate school days, I remember a practicing physical therapist saying something that shocked me. He had a session with a new patient that day, a man with chronic issues and a laundry list of medical diagnoses, including many which were considered preventable conditions or pathologies.


“We get people like this. They don’t take care of themselves, they aren’t motivated. We’ll go through the routine. They’ll probably miss a lot of their appointments, and eventually they’ll just drop off the schedule.” I remember how deeply bothered I was by this perspective. In the eyes of this physical therapist, the man had failed before he even started. There will always be people in physical therapy who don’t succeed due to a lack of their own efforts or motivation. It happens. The part of his mentality that bothered me was the generalization of it all. This individual hadn’t yet done anything to show that they were a lost cause, but because of their diagnoses and conditions, the physical therapist had already given up on them. To clarify, the patient was never treated poorly, but do I think that most people can tell when someone truly has confidence in them or not.


From that day, I promised myself that I would never count someone out before giving them all of my faith and confidence. And, you know what, to this day I continue to be amazed at the things that people can achieve when they’re given a little bit of sincere belief and encouragement.


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I remember the day that I had his evaluation. It’s not that often that you receive a deconditioning and balance referral for someone in their 40’s or early 50’s. He struggled immensely to get out of the waiting room chair, and the stress of walking left his hands shaking on his walker. The journey to the evaluation room left him so out of breath that he had to pause for several minutes before he could tell me his story.


He told me point blank that he’d made a lot of bad choices in his life. He had a lot of severe medical diagnoses, and regretted not turning his life around when things were easier. This was a last ditch effort. Due to the most pressing of his medical issues, he was in need of a certain organ transplant. Without it, he wasn’t going to be around for much longer. The problem was that, as things stood, he wasn’t considered a transplant candidate. He had certain benchmarks that his doctor had set for him in order for this to be reconsidered, but the patient himself seemed to have already given up. It was a story decades in the making.


We went through the evaluation, and I inquired about the cane that his wife had brought along. I encouraged him to try to take a couple of steps with it; I’d be there the whole time to ensure his safety. The look he shot me suggested that he believed I was clinically insane, but he was still willing to make an attempt. The attempt ended quickly, as his anxiety prevented him from making forward progress as soon as he tried to take the first step.


At the end of the evaluation, I went over his findings and the goals I thought he could meet, in addition to giving him some activities to work on to get the ball rolling. As he left, I could tell that he didn’t believe that anything was going to help him. He didn’t believe in himself. After decades of nothing but slow and steady decline, why would anything change now?


For good or bad, sometimes things in life just don’t go the way that we expect them to.


He came back again and again, attending every single session that he was healthy enough to make it to. I set his goals small, and made sure to celebrate every tiny step in the right direction.


He didn’t believe in himself. Doubling down on my own faith in his potential, we gradually nudged each visit’s goals bigger and bigger.


He didn’t believe in himself. And then, something changed.


I’ll always remember the day he came to his appointment so excited to talk to me about the visit he’d just had with his regular medical team that he’d been seeing for a long time. He’d been receiving compliments from the staff about how much better he’d been moving, and how much less anxious he seemed all of the time. He’d started to smile more. He’d also been making strides in the right direction to becoming a transplant candidate. He wanted me to know that he attributed it all to the time that he’d spent in physical therapy.


Emboldened, he started to really excel with his physical therapy, and seemed to truly enjoy coming to his visits. He even started walking completely independently with the cane that originally paralyzed him with fear. Truth be told, everything that he achieved must have been an incredible challenge given his starting point, but he wanted to take it all on. He pushed himself harder than most people I’ve ever worked with. He achieved things that nobody, himself included, ever thought that he could.


At the end of the day, every single hurdle he overcame, he overcame through his own efforts and fortitude. He just couldn’t find his potential on his own. I believe that what a lot of people truly need in this world is the smallest spark of sincere faith in them. Those that need it will take that spark and run with it as far as they can.


Then they’ll go and achieve the unimaginable.




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