Have you ever felt like you were moving through life on autopilot? When life gets busy, it’s easy to get set in our ways. We make plans and expect that things will continue to be as they have been.

Life has an interesting way of reminding us not to take things for granted. A single moment or event can alter our path. Sometimes, it’s something we’d never choose: a change in our health or the health of a loved one, a pandemic, cancer, a neurological disease, a stroke. When reality sets in after the initial shock of a hospitalization or a diagnosis, we can find ourselves with questions we never thought we’d be asking.

How can I continue to work and raise my family?

How can I help my parent recover?

Who am I if I can’t do the things I used to do?

How can I avoid being a burden on my family?

How do my partner and I live life with this disease?

How long do I have left?

How long will it take me to recover?

Will I ever get back to normal?

In my years as a speech-language pathologist, I have heard many of these questions from my patients and their loved ones. I have witnessed care partners’ stress about making changes in their own lives to provide support. I have seen how fear of being a burden and communication challenges can cause people to withdraw and avoid asking for help. In the face of uncertainty, we look to doctors or health professionals to give us answers and reassurance. The honest answer is usually: more uncertainty. 

Your provider might recommend rehabilitation. The World Health Organization defines rehabilitation as “a branch of medicine that aims to enhance and restore functional ability and quality of life to people with physical impairments or disabilities.” As a speech therapist, it is my job to help people improve speech, communication, cognitive, voice, and/or swallowing function. Over the years, I have learned that focusing on these things is only part of being a good practitioner. I like to focus on resilience: building capacity to adjust and move forward. 

Change is like a river: once it sweeps us from the banks, there is no going back to the place we once stood. If we rise to the surface and begin to fight the current, we’ll tire out. Even if we push against it, change keeps moving us forward into the unknown. Resilience means accepting that we can’t go back, but it doesn’t mean giving up. It means rolling onto our backs to float with the current. We might not know where we are going, but if we face the direction we are moving, we are better able to steer our course. We can learn to navigate around the obstacles in our path. We can prepare ourselves for landing at our next destination.