Restoring Ability, Rebuilding Livelihood: Irish Labuca’s Story

For many patients, recovery begins at home, where comfort and personalized therapy come together, with the support of their family and community. Irish Labuca was a neighbor of one of our patients in Barangay Pasil, where we provide homebased care. She is a hardworking mother of two, and has a small food business. In August 2025, she was admitted to the hospital because of a mild stroke. After getting discharged, she went back to her hometown in Toledo, then returned to Pasil after a few weeks. During this time, she was dependent on her family when it came to her activities of daily living. This affected her small business as well, since she couldn’t cook due to her stroke. 

Our Homebased Care staff visited her, and encouraged her to undergo physical therapy. When she began physical therapy, the patient's assessment with our physical therapist revealed weakness on her left side, affecting both her hand and leg. She also struggled with balance and experienced difficulty with walking. She didn’t have the confidence to move around. Irish was given some home exercises for her to do by our physical therapist.  She was consistent with her therapy sessions, which happened twice a week for an hour each session. 

During the course of her homebased therapy, she showed great improvements. Because of this, our homebased staff endorsed her to our Rehab Center in October 2025, where she can continue her therapy with more equipment available. In the first few weeks of her therapy in the rehab center, she struggled a bit with going to the center due to financial difficulties, to the point where she requested to change her schedule from twice a week to once a week. However, she did not let this stop her recovery. She gave her full effort during her therapy sessions, and continued to do her exercises at home as well.

In the center, she was given challenging exercises to improve her strength and balance. She also had treadmill training to improve the way she walked, and increase her walking speed. Now, her strength and balance significantly improved. She can walk like she used to do before her stroke. She gained the confidence to move around to continue her small food business, no longer feeling like she might lose balance when walking.

Aside from physical therapy, she also received occupational therapy. The patient’s poor control and coordination of her right upper extremity caused her to struggle with fine motor exercises at the start of the occupational therapy sessions. Her ability to perform tasks necessary to her food business was impacted by these difficulties. The patient continuously showed motivation and good effort during the sessions. She demonstrated increased knowledge by independently correcting compensatory movements of her right hand and arm during fine motor tasks, and she was able to follow instructions with ease. In order to prepare the patient for the reaching and dynamic movements needed when buying, preparing, and cooking ingredients for her banana cue and turon business, full active range of motion exercises were combined with strengthening exercises during the occupational therapy sessions. Fine motor exercises were also included in the interventions, such as handling small, thin objects to wrap turon and using tongs to cook turon and banana cue. The patient also took part in cutting exercises during the sessions. The patient actively participated in every activity. She then returned to her regular level of preparing and cooking turon and banana cue after gradually reporting greater satisfaction with her performance.