Dublin Lucia Solano is a successful occupational therapist in Las Vegas. Her path wasn’t always easy, but she has balanced raising her son as a single mom with cultivating a thriving career in a field she loves.
While at Dublin High School, Solano played softball and was a class officer. Her senior year, she got pregnant. She continued going to school and graduated in 2008.
For a few years after graduation, she worked to support herself and her young son, first with a job at a retirement home and then at Schreiber Foods.
In 2011, she decided to go back to school at Tarleton State University. “Going back to school was the best thing that ever happened to me,” she said.
Solano graduated with her bachelors degree in 2015, and then went on to Abilene Christian university to earn her masters in occupational therapy in 2018.
After graduation, she earned her board certification to be an occupational therapist.
She worked as an occupational therapist for a nonprofit and a private company before starting her own business.
Solano found her career because of her son. “He geared me towards that field because he was kind of delayed a little bit in some of his milestones,” she said.
“I just took it upon myself to do a little research and saw that it was occupational therapy that he needed. I never really pursued that — I did things on my own with him and never got him evaluated. But looking back now, that inspired me to help new moms know what to look for to set up their kiddos for success, because I wish somebody would have done that for me.”
Solano now lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, where she runs her practice, Elevation Therapy, LLC. “I travel to people’s homes and provide therapy for children with special needs and developmental delays,” she said. “I see kids who just have developmental delays to kiddos who are severe and profound, and it’s more about maintenance and getting them more independent. When they’re not necessarily going to get better, we just try to teach them to be more independent.”
When she’s not working, Solano loves working out. “I’m very involved in the fitness community here in Las Vegas,” she said. “I’ve done a bodybuilding show, I’ve done some online coaching.”
She incorporates her love for fitness into her therapy practice.
“I worked for nonprofits and then I worked for a private company here and I just saw that I had to do things a certain way, very by-the-books, when my mind is more [focused on the] big picture,” she said. “When I do therapy on a child, I treat the child as a whole. For example, a company might want me to work on fine motor skills and be very focused on that. But in reality, if [the child] is lacking in fine motor skills, there’s a lot of other underlying things such as maybe a weak core, or something we’re not looking at, like vision, endurance, muscular strength.”
So, once she started her own practice, Solano took the opportunity to treat patients in a more holistic way. “I kind of incorporated my knowledge of anatomy and my passion for fitness and how the body moves,” she said. “That sets me apart as an occupational therapist because I know the body very well and I apply it.”
Solano keeps her caseload small.
She has around 10 patients total, and visits each patient at home anywhere from 1 to 3 times a week.
Working with children can be challenging and require creativity and flexibility.
“I try to manipulate kids to think that they’re not working, they’re playing,” she said. “That’s a challenge. So sometimes I don’t go in there with a plan and I just kind of go with it. It’s really amazing because as an occupational therapist, I’ve learned to be on-the-fly creative and come up with valuable treatments that I would have not come up with otherwise.”
Solano loves her pediatric practice, but in the future she’s considering transitioning to adult therapy for sports injuries, etc. “I will possibly go more of the sports medicine route because that’s where my passion lies,” she said. “And, kids can wear you out!”
Her career has been extremely rewarding for Solano so far.
“I never knew what this field was and I really wish they would teach this in school as an option for a career,” she said. “I’ve spoken to a couple of schools out here for career day, and I’ve done podcasts to educate people about my field.”
In her free time, Solano enjoys working out, traveling, listening to podcasts and cleaning and organizing.
She lives with her son, Brian, who is 16. Her mother, Leonidas Solano, still lives in Dublin.
Her father, Salvador Solano, passed away earlier this year.
Throughout her life, she’s found inspiration in her family. “I just wanted to provide the best future I could for my son,” she said. “I wanted to give him everything that I didn’t really have growing up.”
Raising a son as a single mom was tough at times. “Trying to do better in life and taking risks while still taking care of a child and taking care of myself physically — that has been the hardest thing,” she said.
Solano’s advice to future Dublin graduates is to consider starting their own businesses. “Working for yourself is life changing,” she said. “You can go to school for whatever, or you don’t have to go to school. But starting your own business, working for yourself, is freedom. It’s hard, it’s risky, but it’s changed my life. I’m happy.”
Editor’s Note: This column chronicles what Dublin graduates have done since high school. If you have any suggestions for other grads, email publisher@ dublincitizen. com.