Growing up with Cerebral Palsy I often wondered if I would ever experience my happily ever after. The fairytales my mom read me always followed the life of a beautiful princess falling in love with a handsome prince. You never read about a prince and princess in wheelchairs or with any type of disability for that matter.
It's important for all of us who are imposed with certain physical boundary conditions to push those boundary conditions as far as possible and maintain as much independence as absolutely possible.
For women with Cerebral Palsy, self-advocacy is probably the most important part, but it's also probably the hardest part because most of those doctors have not encountered women with disabilities. You really have to tell them what you need and tell them what to expect.
When scheduling and preparing for an OB/GYN appointment, women with Cerebral Palsy have additional challenges to consider and address when both scheduling the appointment and once they go their appointment.
For women with Cerebral Palsy, finding a new OB/GYN can be difficult for a variety of reasons: accessibility (both to the building and in the exam rooms), staffing and supports for additional physical needs and more.
5 things for women with Cerebral Palsy to consider when preparing for their OB/GYN appointment
Weight, height and body composition are important indicators for development. The tools used to measure these can be different for children with cerebral palsy.
Children with cerebral palsy (CP) often grow poorly and assessment of growth in this population is further complicated by two main difficulties. Firstly, children may have joint contractures, muscular weakness, scoliosis, and/or involuntary movements that make standing or lying straight difficult, if not impossible.
The future of science advancements is endless. In this video Dr. Ted Conway discusses the possibility of thought to speech. One of the really interesting areas of research in biomedical engineering is thought to speech. The concept of thought to speech is fairly straightforward, the execution to make this a reality is a little more complicated.