Casting Lab in PA School!

You guys, this is the most fun my classmates and I have had together in school since May 2016!! Our professors weren't kidding when they said casting lab day is usually everyone's favorite day (minus graduation day) of PA school. We had one of our professor's husband (who's an Orthopedics PA) to teach us all about casts and splints. Here's how the day went:
8-9am: lecture on the indications, contraindications, complications of casting and splinting, the different kinds of casts/splints, what material is used, and technique. We also talked about follow up care and cast after care. This was just a quick overview of casting, but we will get more information in clinical medicine next semester over orthopedics.

9-10: Demo lab for the whole class. And then we got split into two groups to be able to practice on each other.

I volunteered to be the model for our class but in reality just ended up looking like I'm super accident prone! What you see in the below picture is a short cast on my left leg, a sugar tong/stirrup splint on my right arm, and a thumb spica on my left arm.

Then we got to do a short cast on each other so my friend Rachel (who made her debut here) and I went to town with padding and practiced on each other again. Casting is a lot of fun to do and is not as bad as I thought it would be (in terms of learning). There are three layers to a cast: a stockinette, padding, and fiberglass! You wet the fiberglass roll in warm water and then wrap it around the padding fairly quickly or it will get dry and hard. Then you can apply some kind of lubricant or lotion on the fiberglass.

Next, we did the stirrup/sugar tong split on each other's arms. For that we used stockinette, padding, plaster, more padding, and an ACE wrap. 

So that's it! I can't believe it but we are less than 5 months away from starting clinical rotations. In May, the class of 2019 will be starting their first semester as we transition to our last didactic semester of PA school. There is still lots to learn before then, but I know these last few months are going to fly by quickly. Hope you all are have started off spring on a positive note and are soaking up the sunshine :) Thanks for reading!

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