Tag: Disabled

Navigating Life After Becoming Chronically Disabled

My blog focuses on Health/Wellness. Many people develop chronic illnesses at some point in their lives. This creates all kinds of changes for us and those around us. The following contributed post is entitled, Navigating Life After Becoming Chronically Disabled.

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Adjusting to life after becoming chronically disabled is very emotional and also logistically taxing, but with the right resources and community support available, after being diagnosed it can become an enriching journey of adaptation and purpose.

Photo by Romain Virtuel on Unsplash

Support Through Life Care

Working with a life care planning company can give you invaluable guidance and resources. These experts specialize in creating custom plans tailored to your specific needs, helping you to address challenges and reach your long-term goals more easily. They cover things like managing medical services and even finding the right programs for you. Life care planners offer holistic approaches that enhance your quality of life, covering everything from financial to resource allocation so as to give you a more secure future.

Building a Support Network

Surrounding yourself with a strong support network is important when managing your chronic disability. Family, friends, healthcare providers and advocacy groups can all give you emotional support, practical assistance and moral encouragement as you make life-altering decisions. Peer support communities, whether they are online or in person, can be life changing. Sharing experiences with like-minded peers forms a sense of community while giving you amazing advice from people who understand your daily struggles. Advocating for your needs is important in building a network. From work, school and healthcare settings to social interactions such as events and sports leagues, being clear about the accommodations and expectations will make sure that you have smoother interactions and form an atmosphere that builds disability inclusion.

Mastering the Art of Adaptation

Living with a chronic disability does mean becoming more adapting. Mobility aids, accessibility apps and voice-activated devices all play an amazing role in making your everyday tasks easier. While time and energy management become important life skills. Those that are living with chronic conditions often learn the “spoon theory” approach for prioritizing activities that truly matter in balance with their physical or mental constraints. It’s not about doing everything but rather about doing what matters most. So you are adapting.

Rewriting Goals and Purpose

Living with a chronic disability doesn’t mean your dreams are unattainable and you should just forget about them. It may just mean they require reimagining. Setting meaningful goals, like creative outlets, new career paths, advocacy work or simply self-compassion, is very important in maintaining a sense of purpose. This can sometimes lead you to discover hidden talents or passions through this process. Meanwhile, self-compassion should not be neglected. Taking breaks for your mental health needs as well as practicing mindfulness are important parts of living a balanced life.

Conclusion

There’s no simple or clear-cut answer to “now what?”. Your life after becoming chronically disabled can be an unpredictable rollercoaster ride that is filled with challenges and opportunities too. But when you look for support, adapt to new realities, and remain open-minded to possibilities that come your way, living with chronic disability may lead you to growth and self-discovery. Chronic disability reshapes anyone’s life, but with resilience and resourcefulness it can open doors never thought possible before the chronic disability occurred. Stepping carefully forward could create meaning from living a valuable existence.

Helping Your Disabled Relative To Live Easily

My blog focuses on Health/Wellness. Many of us have relatives and friends who are disabled. With them having special needs, it’s important to understand how to make their lives comfortable. The following contributed post is entitled, Helping Your Disabled Relative To Live Easily.

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If you have a relative who has a disability, you are probably keen to help them live their life as fully as they possibly can. This is the kind of thing that is going to be really important for you to consider, and you should find that you are going to want to think about it from a number of different angles. Anything you can do to help them with this is definitely going to be appreciated, and remember that the goal is to help them live fully and independently as best as they can.

Pic Credit – CCO License

Understand Their Needs

One of the main things you can really do is to put effort into understanding the needs of your disabled relative. If you can understand what they need and why, this is something that you are going to find really important to consider, and it’s vital that you are doing this as best as you can. Start by having an open conversation with them about what they need and want. Disabilities vary widely, so it’s important to hold no assumptions and instead to ask about their daily challenges as they see them. This will give you the information you need to help them.

Adapt The Living Space

Helping them to modify the home is going to help a lot in allowing them to live fully at home, so this is a really important part of the whole process. Even small home adaptations can make a huge difference. That might include installing grab bars in bathrooms and along stairways, ensuring doorways are wide enough for wheelchairs or walkers, and adding ramps and non-slip flooring where necessary too. If you have all this, and plenty of lighting throughout the house, that is going to help them to live much more easily.

Pic Credit – CCO License

Encourage Independence

You’ll find that what everyone wants at the root of it all is to have the option to live independently. So everything you do to help should ideally be aimed around this, and if you are encouraging them to be independent you are going to find that it really helps a great deal. The goal should be support rather than control, and it’s vital to help them use adaptive tools that are going to promote self-reliance. If you do that, it’s going to help them to feel fully respected as an individual, which is what really matters in all this.

Provide Emotional Support

Let’s not forget that your disabled relative is also going to need some emotional support, and it may be that you want to provide them with this as much as you can. There’s no doubt that living with a disability can be very isolating, and it’s going to be useful if there is regular social interaction as well as some shared activities going on. That combined with genuinely listening to them should help you to help them live with their disability so much more easily and in a much more empowered way.