Setting up a comfortable home office is key to optimizing work/life balance.
On Thursday, March 24th, 2022, the Cerebral Palsy Foundation hosted the first ever Cerebral Palsy Congressional Briefing with a panel of physicians, patient and self advocates.
March is National Cerebral Palsy Month in the United States and is an opportunity to highlight the history of cerebral palsy advocacy - where we’ve been, where we are currently, and the opportunities that are ahead.
As a physician and researcher, I skeptically looked forward to learning more about mindfulness practice, because there is evidence it helps with stress management, self-regulation, focus, productivity and happiness. As a mom, I felt that weird mix of guilt that I was going to focus on “not-my-children” for a whole day, excited anticipation and anxiety that maybe I would be a complete failure at this. It turns out all the mental baggage I took into the workshop was the exact opposite of what mindfulness tries to achieve. The daily practice has since changed my life.
PTSD can be common in parents after a child with Cerebral Palsy has left the NICU. One of the hardest days of my life as a NICU parent was not what I would have expected it to be. It was the day I went home without my baby, after spending every waking moment since my emergency C-section by his incubator. I never knew I had a dream about what it would be like to have a baby until that dream was taken away.