My name is Angela Beninga, I'm a physician here at Shepherd Center. I deal
primarily in outpatient post acute services with individuals who have had
spinal cord injuries and brain injuries.
I grew up in South Dakota, so I did most
of my undergraduate training there, and then I did med school at Kansas City at
what used to be called the University of Health Sciences but is now Kansas City
University of Medicine and Biosciences. I got an osteopathic doctorate and then
went to Michigan State University for my residency and the University of Michigan
for my spinal cord injury fellowship.
I was always really fascinated with the
body, and how it worked, and how it would heal itself, and I was very athletic and liked
sports, and so I really got into more of the sports medicine piece of it. I thought
that that's what I would want to do forever, but it intrigued
me what you could do to your body, and how it would let you do those things, and
so, you know, from the therapy aspect to the medical aspect of it, being a
physical medicine and rehab doctor just fit. It's the functional piece of
medicine, it's the physical piece of medicine,
it's the quality of life, the activities, the things that you can do and the life
that you can lead related to medicine, so it really incorporated all the things
that were interesting to me growing up.
My primary responsibilities at Shepherd
Center are in the post-acute realm, so once an individual has completed their
inpatient stay at Shepherd Center, or if they've completed an inpatient
rehabilitation at a different facility, they come to Shepherd Center to continue
either through our day programs or through outpatient clinics, even after they've
completed a therapy course, just being able to manage their ongoing needs after
a catastrophic injury. So I'm currently the director of the spinal cord injury
day program, and then I also have a full-time clinic
handling individuals who are in the chronic stages of their spinal cord
injury and brain injury.
I think my philosophy for medicine is pretty
laidback and honest. A big part of my job is to educate my patients
on how to manage their impairments and their disabilities long-term not just in
the next couple of months and how to rehab from their injury, but really to
get back to whatever life they're looking to lead, and so it's short
term management, it's long term management, you know, just being open and
being creative and staying positive. I think the biggest thing that sets
Shepherd apart from other facilities is expertise, the amount of knowledge and
experience, the way we look at an individual who comes in with an injury.
It's a wholesome, all-inclusive completely comprehensive way to manage
their needs whether it's medical needs, whether it's equipment needs, whether
it's getting back to work, getting back to school, being able to go to the
grocery store, going to the airport, teaching people that they can drive
again, teaching them that they can fly again, there's so many things that we
address here that I've never seen at any of the other facilities that I trained
at or worked at really trying to look at every aspect of their life and making
sure it's not just about their injury, it's about their life and their
caregivers and their families lives. For new patients coming to Shepherd,
some of the advice that I would give them is to stay open,
be creative and stay positive. So we're really looking at, again, trying to get
them back to their quality of life, and we may teach them to do things in a
totally different way than any other facility does or in a different way than
they've ever imagined they could do it, so that's part of being open. Being
positive is imperative, I think part of the culture here is that we are always
looking forward, there's a huge sense of hope and excitement on the potential for
our patients, so we want them to feel positive about what their future entails,
and then to be creative because we're going to come up
with all sorts of interesting ways to do things to care for themselves, to be able
to get back to playing sports, or the job they wanted, those sorts of things,
and really, really trust our expertise, and trust our ability to want their life
to be fulfilled. I think when I look back in my retirement, I just want to know
that I helped people to get to where they wanted to go. It's not up to me what
the end of their road looks like or what their goals are, it's really about
listening to them, finding out what what excites them, what they want to get back
into, and I hope that they see me as a conduit to getting those goals
and getting the life that they want to lead.