Physical Therapy & Healing: Nikki Federkeil
Name: Nikki Federkeil
Where are you based? Baltimore, MD
Hometown: Eldersburg, MD
Nikki Federkeil is in the business of healing. In her third and final year of the Doctor of Physical Therapy Program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, she is excitingly close to becoming “Dr. Federkeil,” a title that she was not always sure she wanted to pursue.
Nikki’s career journey is an example of how childhood aspirations can come to fruition, but not always exactly as we expected. As we grow up, we realize that the broad careers we learned about in our youth — doctors, lawyers, musicians, anything you can think of — are more complex than just a simple title; the real world has so much more to offer than we realize when we’re young. Learning about Nikki’s experience as she has pursued her Physical Therapy degree exemplifies this reality.
PART I: “IT WAS LIKE FATE”
In many ways, Nikki’s pursuit of her Doctor of Physical Therapy program is a childhood dream coming true, but that dream wavered at some points.
Nikki had her first encounter with physical therapy at age 13, when she tore her ACL playing basketball. “I went to physical therapy for that, and I thought it was really cool. I really liked my physical therapists, and I didn’t understand what they were doing, but they made me better,” she remembers.
After that experience, she thought physical therapy might be something she wanted to pursue as a career, but was soon discouraged by the extensive educational requirements: “When I looked into it, I kind of thought physical therapy was going to be too hard, because I didn’t really see myself as somebody that would go to graduate school and become a doctor.” She continues, “So I actually went to college — I majored in biology — and I thought I would be a high school biology teacher.”
Nikki recalls that “it was like fate” that she then tore her ACL again in college while she was still finalizing her career choice. She explains, “I went to physical therapy again, and then I was like, ‘Yeah, this is what I want to do, for sure.’ So I switched it up, and here I am.”
Perception vs. Reality
Even after she decided to pursue the degree, she has been surprised by how her interests within the field have changed. She divulges, “I really thought I was going to be in sports, because that’s why I got into it.” She elaborates, “I think a lot of physical therapists go into the profession thinking they’re going to work with athletic teams or something, because that’s kind of idealistic.”
However, Nikki has been pleasantly surprised by the sheer range of options that physical therapists have for specializing in their work: “I mean, even people that want to be physical therapists don’t know about it until you start learning about it, and then you realize there are so many different cool things you can do, so many different people that you can help.”
After completing two years of classroom and lab-based learning, Nikki is currently completing her clinical rotations. She’s working significant hours, about 50 per week, shadowing Physical Therapists and getting hands-on experience. She’s balancing this work with studying for her National Physical Therapy Examination, which will take place in May.
This hands-on experience has helped open her eyes to the different paths she can take as a physical therapist that she never had imagined: “Like I’m working with stroke patients right now, and I’m working with people that had to have amputations, and that’s not something I would have pictured myself doing when I pointed to therapy at all, and I actually really like it.”
Investing in Her Patients
Nonetheless, no job or profession is perfect. “Being a physical therapist is hard,” Nikki shares. “It’s just busy, and you feel pressure with taking care of people. Now, it’s not just theoretical. It’s like, this is an actual person that wants to get better.”
In her current role, Nikki is working in an inpatient hospital, working one-on-one with patients in two-hour blocks. In addition to the many hours she spends working directly with patients, Nikki spends many of her evenings researching and brushing up on her studies at night so that she can better serve her patients.
“It’s really interesting being one-on-one with the patient the whole time. That’s something you don’t get in every physical therapy setting, and not even in a lot of medical settings… so you really start to understand what they want and what they care about,” she describes.
Nikki enjoys learning about her patients’ interests and incorporating them into their physical therapy treatment in creative ways. She describes a specific encounter where a football-loving patient was more mobile than she had ever seen him before when she put together an activity that incorporated matching football team logos. She finds it encouraging to see that her hard work to really personalize her patients’ treatment can pay off in such visible ways.
Decisions on the Horizon
It’s exciting as an outside observer to hear how Nikki’s dreams have been able to evolve with time and age; I think it’s comforting for anyone who is still unsure of their long-term career aspirations (like me!) to know that it’s not always a linear process or decision. In some ways, Nikki is doing exactly what she expected as a physical therapist, but she has been able to see how that profession can be much more versatile than she originally anticipated. And no matter what she chooses, she knows she’ll be able to help people heal.
What’s next for Nikki after she is fully licensed? She can’t be exactly sure, but she is excited about the prospect of exploring pelvic health physical therapy in her next clinical rotation.
Physical therapists who specialize in pelvic health can treat patients with a range of needs related to the pelvic region, including patients who are recovering from gender reassignment surgery or individuals with incontinence.
“I think what drew me to [pelvic health] was that it’s something that people don’t know about, and they don’t know how much better their lives could be, and then we change that for them,” Nikki explains.
PART II: FEMINISM & SELF CARE
Nikki notes that she feels lucky that Physical Therapy is a field with a lot of women to learn from. At the heart of it, Nikki is a self-proclaimed “girl’s girl,” and she has become passionate about feminism in her adulthood.
She recalls, “I remember my aunt talking to me about girl power since I was little, and I just always thought that was a cool thing. And then, I mean, I don’t think I really understood what feminism was until — probably not until college.” In college, she realized that feminism could be controversial when her self-identification as a feminist seemed to offend some people. Nonetheless, she embraced the identity since it embodied so much of her beliefs.
We discuss the aspects of feminism that she finds the most pressing, and she explains that being pro-choice is one of the issues she thinks about the most. The two of us talk about the nature of being pro-choice, and how it’s about wanting people to have a safe option to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. This is especially important from a public health perspective; without the option to choose abortion, some people may pursue unsafe alternatives.
Nikki attributes much of her feminism to the role models in her life. “I have a lot of women in my life that I really look up to, and of course my mom is the first one on that list, because we have the stereotypical mother-daughter best friend kind of relationship.” She continues, “She doesn’t let anything get to her, and I just think that’s inspiring.”
Focusing on Self Care
In the spirit of caring about women as a whole, Nikki has been working on caring for herself as well. We talk about how the shutdowns related to COVID-19 gave her the opportunity to step back and reflect upon herself and her needs. With that, she chose to start virtual therapy.
This is not the first time one of my interviewees has mentioned recently starting therapy, and I note that with Nikki. We remark together that having a therapist seems to be becoming more normalized — like having a primary care doctor — and we agree that it’s a good thing to see so many people making conscious efforts to take care of their mental health.
She explains, “I’ve been kind of learning how to take care of myself a little bit better. I mean, one of the things that’s always been tough for me is social things, and now that’s kind of been taken away, so I can kind of just focus on myself.”
PART III: RECOMMENDATIONS & ROLE MODELS
Want to learn more about things that inspire and energize Nikki? Check out her recommendations below.
Medial Recommendations:
- True Crime Podcasts, like Last Podcast on the Left, Morbid, and My Favorite Murder
- Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History (Podcast)
- Love Island (TV Show)
Women She Admires:
- Megan Rapinoe
- Michelle Obama
- Beyoncé Knowles
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