Blindness Awareness Month is a good time to take a closer look at your mom’s vision loss and determine how to help her. When vision loss is unavoidable, it’s important to help your mom maintain her independence. Occupational therapy is a great way to ensure she has the tools she needs to stay in her home.
What Does Your Mom Need?
Now that her vision is going, what does your mom need the most? Transportation is probably one of the issues she’s facing. Ask her about how her vision loss is impacting her daily routines.
With vision loss, she cannot drive, but she can’t rely solely on you to bring her to social events, stores, and area attractions all week. She needs help learning how to arrange rides on her own, or you could arrange for caregivers to help her with transportation each week.
Is she finding it hard to cook meals? If your mom can’t see what she’s doing, she’s not going to be able to slice, chop, dice, or cook. She may start to rely solely on frozen dinners and the microwave, but even then it can be hard for her to set the controls on the microwave.
If you imagine what it would be like to lose vision, you start to imagine how hard it would be to clean your home when you cannot see anything in front of you. You can adapt by turning your head to get more range, but it’s still limiting and slows you down.
What Is Occupational Therapy?
Occupational therapists show people how to overcome obstacles in order to live an engaged, fulfilling life. Often, it’s a therapeutic service designed to help someone learn how to complete daily activities when health issues or disabilities impact how easy it is to complete normal routines.
Your mom has age-related macular degeneration and it’s robbing her of her central vision. She doesn’t have to let this stop her from being independent. She just needs to learn new ways of doing things and how to use technology and assistive devices to complete tasks.
How Does Occupational Therapy Work?
Arrange occupational therapy by talking to your mom’s doctors and then learning what her limitations may be. This information will be valuable during the initial meeting with an occupational therapist.
Keep a list of things your mom likes to do each day, where she’s challenged, and what she’s able to do without any help. Your mom and her occupational therapist can work on those challenges together and find new ways to do them.
Once you have this information jotted down, call a home health care agency and ask about occupational therapy. You’ll find out more about the therapy service, pricing, and how to get started.