Family caregivers have innumerable needs. The lack of time, money and information fails to encompass them all. I could make a list of fifty and probably you can add fifty more.
Paramount to all the hardships and challenges we face, the number one problem that family caregivers complain about is isolation.
Why is that?
In the United States, 26% of all adults are family caregivers. Our numbers cut across every ethnical, racial,and economic stratum of our society. Despite our individual situations, we struggle with a common burden. Often, we are united by common circumstance.
So . . . Why do so many people feel so alone?
Maybe something we need is just a place to be a community.
My original idea was to set up a site of links to helpful places, then I decided that the site needed to be a sort of ezine with feature articles on topics important not only to family caregivers but to all health care consumers. What I now hope this site becomes, is an interactive ezine community.
So please. Take a look through these pages. If this site saves you time, provides you with information, or even helps you to figure out how you're going to be homebound and still earn enough money to pay your bills, then it has accomplished some part of it's main purpose. But maybe, it will also lead you to a friend. Someone who can honestly say, "I know exactly what you mean."
PERSONALLY OURS
(One reason this site can be hard to find, if you go to squirreltales.org you'll end up on a site for the care and feeding of baby squirrels)
Patient Hands is currently selecting links for another section to be called "Personally Ours".
"Personally Ours" will center around links to websites created and maintained by family caregivers and patients. These sites tend to fall into one of three catagories. Those which inform and pass on practical solutions, those which are intended to stand as personal memorials or inform about a specific family's need for assistance and those which lean strongly toward promoting activism for the webmaster's personal cause.
At this time, we are reviewing all personal sites involving families and family caregiving regardless of intent. If you have a website that falls into any of these catagories or if you know of one or know someone who is in the process of starting one and would like to have it considered for inclusion in the "Personally Ours" section, please contact: Web Mistress.