Transcription:
Importance of Recreation Therapy in Recovery from Spinal Cord or Brain Injury

Melanie Cole (Host):  When a person first sustains a spinal cord or brain injury, they’re faced with many issues about how they will manage their lifestyle and daily schedule. An important part of the solution is recreation therapy, which gives people leisure counseling and skills to increase their overall wellness in the many aspects of life affected by spinal cord or brain injury. My guest today is Kelly Edens. She is the manager of Shepherd Center’s Recreational Therapy Program. Welcome to the show, Kelly. Tell us, what is recreation therapy and what does it encompass as it connects with spinal cord injury and brain injury? 

Kelly Edens (Guest):  Well, recreation therapy is a component of each individual’s rehab here at Shepherd Center that enables them to do things that maybe they never had the chance to do or something they’ve done in the past, learning again with adaptive equipment, but is also exercising different muscles and components within the body to help them increase their endurance, strength, range of motion, circulation, and overall, meet the best quality of life per individual. 

Melanie:  Does this start right when the injury is sustained and dealt with while they’re in hospital, or is this something that is an outpatient activity? 

Kelly:  Recreation therapy here at Shepherd, we actually see patients right away. So I go into the room as soon as the person is here, admitted to Shepherd. Then we are continuing with them through their rehab status and through their stay. Patients will be in inpatient therapy as well as day program, and then we also see patients out in the community. Our continued care ranges from when they’re in-house all the way to when they’re at home. They can come back and do activities, art, workshops, and everything with us to start something new or do something again. 

Melanie:  Now, what are they able to do? I know it depends on the severity, obviously, of the injury. What kinds of things do you work with them on being able to do and then teaching the loved ones to do some of this stuff too on a daily basis? 

Kelly:  Here at Shepherd, we pretty much will do anything an individual enjoys doing. It could be anything from just reading a book to shooting billiards. We go on hunting trips, aquatics. We have six amazing specialists that work here with fitness center in the department in the area of aquatics, horticulture, sports, music, arts, and outdoors. In any of those areas, we will do leisure skills in those components, showing each patient the adaptive equipment or extra time or whatever component they would need to do the activity again. 

Melanie:  That’s amazing that you’re able to take them out into the community and even into the woods to do some of these great things again. When they’re with their loved ones and at home, what kinds of things do you advise that they do on a very daily basis to keep up their emotional well-being and their physical strength and all of it coming together? 

Susan:  While they’re inpatient, we definitely do as much education as possible. We’ll also do as much hands on as possible. We have 11 adaptive sports teams that are part of this center as well. We have a lot of equipment to use. Once patients are educated and is actually able to use the equipment or do the scale, we then are already establishing relationships with either equipment or facilities or whatever leisure skill is in their home communities, no matter where it is in the United States to show them how and where they can do it again. Loved ones, family, friends are always encouraged to come to any of our staff when they’re in rehab as well as when they’re in our community events. The family is a huge aspect because they’re the ones that are going to be there when they go home to do it. We definitely encourage that along the way. We have several camps. We have ski trips, or scuba diving trips a lot of times are used for family components as well, and they just go and have a family trip. 

Melanie:  How fun! Tell us a little bit about the Adventure Skills Workshop that you hold annually. 

Kelly:  That is one of our largest programs. Adventure Skills Workshop is a three-day camp every May, the third week in May. We have it at Jackson’s Gap, Alabama and we have been giving -- clients in the area participate from all up and down the East Coast. We do everything from water to outdoor activities, rugby, fishing by boat or by land, water skiing, jet skiing, tubing. We have a zip line, climbing wall. We do water polo, scuba diving, pretty much any kind of being in the outdoors and aquatics to learn for the first time, or you’ve been to camp many years and you’re there to do it again. It’s a great resource for peer support and to work on terrain mobility and just the little components that you need for everyday life that you don’t realize that you might need to look at. 

Melanie:  Well, technology is so huge in society today. Kelly, how do you work with patients on recreational therapy in the technology world, teaching them how to use computers, or in case of brain injury, maybe re-teaching these things? It could be very frustrating for the loved one, so how do you advise working on those sorts of things? 

Kelly:  What we do here within our program, we use iPads a great deal, working on simple programs to help them get to the big picture. We also have a lot of our equipment is used with this technology. For instance, if we have someone who has a high level of injury that maybe cannot move anything below his neck, we actually have a rifle that you fit with a cuff so that you still shoot a gun so they can still go hunting. We have many pieces of equipment like that that expands to individuals so they can still do activities without actually functioning their body like you or I. 

Melanie:  That sounds great. Now, give us a little bit about more information about recreational therapy and other therapies that you use, like art therapy and music therapy, to help these patients. 

Kelly:  Yes, art and music are two big therapies that many of our patients get to. We evaluate every patient that comes through our program, and depending on what goals that person should have, they see the specialist within our art frame. We do everything from watercolors, any kind of art medium. We have a kiln here. We have a full-working darkroom. We have adaptive dance. We will bring in resources as well as what we have here to expand the person to get as much as we can for them to live their life to the fullest, and not just for activities that they can do every day, but they might have a wedding or they might have a dance they want to go to if they’re in high school, so we show them that they can do the skills again. Music is something, too, that is always ongoing, either with singing or musical instruments. But yet it’s also working on breathing technique and on exercise and strength and endurance, all these things that someone working on functioning within any kind of rehab status, you’re actually doing the same things. In every skill that you do, you’re just having a little fun while you do it. 

Melanie:  One of the other interesting things about your profession, Kelly, is that while you deal with all of these physical things and getting them hunting and fishing and singing and drawing and using technology and all these things, you’re also dealing with the emotional and spiritual problems that come with brain and spinal cord injury. How does recreational therapy help with those aspects? 

Kelly:  Yes, emotional is very big within our area. What we do daily sort of breaks the ice a lot emotionally, and by involving the family and friends, that’s a great deal, too. With the resources we have here in allowing patients to see what they can do and how they can do it again, or maybe they never had a chance to ever do this and now they do, it’s big on that component. So everything else, what has happened to them, almost takes a little bit of a back seat because really focus on what we’re teaching them then. Having the family involved as well is huge. They have the support now but also when they go home. 

Melanie:  In just the last few minutes, Kelly, give us your best advice for people considering recreational therapy for their loved one that suffered a spinal cord or brain injury and why they should come to Shepherd Center for their recreational therapy. 

Kelly:  Our recreational program we do offer up to the community, and it’s no charge. We are a not-for-profit. Insurance does not sustain our profession, which is not a great thing, but it’s what pulls everything together. It puts all the pieces from the puzzle that you do in rehab, it puts it all in one. It helps any individual, no matter what type of disability you have, any kind of adaptive equipment, education as far as verbal or hands-on, and then actually physically doing it. With the components of recreational therapy, it gives people life. It gives people the fullness to want to get up the next morning, to want to do things with their family, with their kids, with themselves, going back to work, into the living life, bring the whole thing back together as one and with the components of wellness and health and keeping that stable and together. 

Melanie:  Thank you so much. You’re listening to Shepherd Center Radio. For more information about the Shepherd Center Recreational Therapy Program, you can go to shepherd.org. That’s shepherd.org. This is Melanie Cole. Thanks so much for listening and have a great day.