Personal experience: how disability changes lives

What you need to be prepared for

1. Initially, you have someone to turn to for help: family, friends, good acquaintances, people who owe you something. At first, the problems are little by little solved.

2. Then the list of friends is thinning: someone stops answering calls, someone promises to help but does not help, someone “helps” so that they will not be contacted anymore. Good acquaintances disappear and all the more are lost all the rest. But if you can still be useful to society, people will appear who start using your resources. The more desperate the situation you find yourself in, the more impudent these people are.

Of course, there are those who sincerely want to help and offer a person with a disability a job that they could well entrust to a healthy performer. But someone just takes the opportunity to pay pennies for a voluminous task, knowing that a disabled person has little choice. Some stoop to deception. Such are people, and their weaknesses are so strong.

3. In the meantime, a person with a disability loses faith in humanity. “He's honest, he won't do that”, “We're family!”, “How can a person forget how much I did for him?” and many other beliefs are destroyed one by one.

4. Wishlist disappears from the expanded to-do list: you need to at least keep what you have. You can blow dust off your car and handle power tools and other items that are dear to you. When you have a disability, these things pass into the hands of other family members - often inexperienced ones - or even strangers. Often, everything breaks down even more than is repaired, and you can only observe and give advice, which sooner or later leads to tension on both sides and even quarrels.

5. At the next stage, a person begins to give up unnecessary things. When you sell a private car to get rid of the cost of maintaining it, the ability to move out of the house suffers. Initially, it seems that if there are several cars in a large family, then you can ask relatives to take them to a pension fund or a bank. But over the years it turns out that there is no such possibility. Add to this the absence of an "accessible environment", and it turns out that life will now take place within the apartment. For wheelchair users, this zone is even smaller - up to the first threshold or narrow space in the room.

The word "zone" is not accidental here: over time, the life of a paralyzed person is perceived in this way - as imprisonment. In a comfortable solitary confinement cell with internet, music and TV.

Life imprisonment is very painful. I knew people who committed suicide when they realized how they were going to live.

6. A year later, the long-awaited humility appears. Nice phrase, huh? You have to forcibly humble yourself, otherwise the question is whether you can bear the responsibility of your spouse and parent. You start to equip your life and adapt yourself. You order other furniture: a suitable bed, a table. You are thinking how to decorate the room so that it would be easier to keep positive in it.

However, he is lost, this positive. There are physical consequences that threaten a lying person. Amputation? Easily! Death from curvature of the spine? Easy!

7. The word "depression" is getting more and more serious. “What depression? I don't have time for this! I work two jobs in order to have time to make repairs, pay off debts and loans,”I said before my disability, chuckling. Depression is now serious. The world turns away from you, your loved ones betray you, you collapse physically - how can you maintain an optimistic attitude?

This is another dangerous period. Someone becomes addicted to alcohol or drugs. Someone, having gone through the most difficult time of first accepting their disability, is now committing suicide.

8. Then the road starts up the hill. We no longer count on anyone, only ourselves and our pension.

But what is this pension? It is good if you have previously worked in a significant sector and your actions were judged according to merit. In my work book, continuous experience is noted: from 1992 to 2007, but my pension turned out to be lower than the social one. If I hadn’t worked a day all this time, and then became disabled, I would have received the same amount!

And when this scanty pension is not even enough to pay for utilities and maintain everyday life, a person thinks about part-time work. What I was able to do before, now it is impossible to do, so the new life forces me to master new professions.

You could end on a positive note and talk about how the New Vasyuki blossomed, but in fact you get even more problems. You are superfluous in the labor market.

You offer your services to acquaintances, spam on social networks, call old employers, but in fact, you are simply wasting the time that is so necessary for physical recovery and household chores. Nobody is going to pay you for your work as much as a healthy employee: you cannot be present in the office or be constantly in touch.

A paralyzed person requires a total of about 4 hours of physical therapy per day. Let's add here the time for hygiene and medical procedures - it will turn out to be almost 6 hours, and this does not take into account household chores. Physiotherapy is another important plus: it gives energy and helps to cope with depression. And if you decide to do something to the detriment of training, it will not lead you to anything good.

What to do to ease the situation

1. Place exercise therapy in your schedule as efficiently as possible. It is useful to set aside 1–1, 5 hours in the morning for classes, and the same amount closer to 4–5 pm. I also recommend doing a 5-minute warm-up every hour - it is very useful to combine it with the habit of drinking water.

2. Keep a list of household chores. My recommendation is to use Todoist, which allows you to break down tasks by specialization and share the list with people who could get the job done (for money or as help). Before you go to the specialists, try to accumulate an impressive list of tasks so that the cost of home visits will pay off (of course, if we are not talking about urgent problems).

3. Don't whine, they don't like whiners. They are much more willing to help people who steadfastly meet life's circumstances. And it also happens that among those whom you would not even think about, there are people with problems even worse than yours.

4. Once you are comfortable with your schedule and training, identify your options and think about what you could do in your setting. Start by being creative: if you find some talent, it will be much easier for you to master your niche in the future. If creative pursuits are not for you, choose from the options available on the market. For example, you can try yourself in specialties related to the Internet or calls. Keep in mind that almost everyone will try to take advantage of your desperate situation, so do not expand on your situation, just look for a part-time job.

The short conclusion is simple: moderate your ambitions, do everything that is possible in your conditions for your recovery, and do not rely on the state or outside help.