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What are your tips for staying independent at your own home?

Aging Well | Last Active: Apr 13 12:16pm | Replies (312)

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@edsutton

Practice Imaginative ProActivity!

Go through your house and your daily routines imagining that
1) You are having dizzy spells.
2) You are in a wheelchair or walker (borrow them to test)
3) You can't reach higher than your shoulder or lower than your mid-thigh
4) You can't lift heavy things (like a large iron skillet) or your hands are weak
5) You have trouble with complex sequences
6) Your vision is fuzzy

What can you do about this?

If you want to age in your house, Now is the time to start preparing your house and now is the time to coordinate with your house mate.

Examples:
Make a walk in shower with chair now. There won't be time to do it when you've had surgery and need that shower chair to bathe.
Make sure you have grab bars and solid furniture along the route from bed to bathroom and toilet. Vertigo can come as a sudden surprise at 3am.
Make it a habit to not gather unnecessary things, and weed out clutter often.

Planning to care for ourselves as long as possible can be an enjoyable project.
It is self-empowering.
Start doing it now and you'll enjoy the feeling of lightness!

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Replies to "Practice Imaginative ProActivity! Go through your house and your daily routines imagining that 1) You are..."

Great advice.

Thank you for this post. I'm making a copy of it now to put on the fridge and work on each of these things. Most are already in place but some I need to improve on. Currently my husband is dealing with an injury he received while getting up in the middle of the night and falling due to hypotension. So, there are some things I wasn't prepared to conquer yet. It was a wake up call and this list will also help tremendously. Thank you for posting it.