Your comfortable life can be undone in an instant – but we’re there to help
Jane-claire Judson reports on a new recovery strategy for charity Chest Heart & Stroke Scotland
Walkingthedog,meeting friends for a cup of tea, living your life... What is the reality of living with the impact of illnesses such as lung and heart disease, or a stroke?
The reality is that these simple pleasures can be part of your life one day and gone the next. If we go beyond the statistics – an astounding one in five of us live with these health conditions – what does it mean for the people who are affected?
Our health has an impact on everything – our working lives, our social lives, our family lives. But unless you’ve lived with that experience, it can be easy to forget the daily challenges that many of us face, sometimes just to do the small, but important, things that we usually take for granted.
Everyone’s reality is different. For Jimmy, who had a severe stroke at the age of 64, it was brain damage that affected his communication. He lost the confidence to leave home, and lost the social life he’d always enjoyed.
Many of us take for granted the ability to speak, to read, and to understand what people are saying to us. It can be difficult to imagine losing that, and struggle to do simple things like take a bus somewhere, read a book, or talk about a film you’ve seen. Jimmy is one of around 124,000 people in Scotland who are living with the impact of a stroke.
For Ian, who was diagnosed with COPD (chronic lung disease) when he was in his 60s, constant breathlessness led to anxiety and depression.
As people who have experienced asthma attacks know, struggling to breathe is frightening. To get a sense of what that feels like, take a minute to try and breathe through a straw, and you’ll quickly see the difference that it makes. Imagine that being your reality, every day, every breath. Ian is one of around 488,000 people in Scotland living with asthma or COPD, and many more remain undiagnosed.
Janice had a heart attack 11 years ago. Within 20 minutes an ambulance was at Janice’s door, by lunchtime she had an artery cleared and a stent inserted. She had become one of the 230,000 people in Scotland who are living with coronary heart disease.
In all of these real cases, Jimmy, Ian and Janice needed our support to help them get beyond just coping with their change of circumstances, and get back to living.
Jimmy receives communication support from our volunteers which has seen his confidence transformed; we helped Ian set up a local social and exercise group to bring together a community of people with COPD; Janice attends a support group and can access our advice line and information.
We need to reach far more of the one in five people affected by our conditions. Where we are able to provide services varies according to the funding and resources available to us. Depending on where you live in Scotland, you may be able to access our stroke nurses, our rehabilitation support services, or a local community group. As well as this, there is our website help and information, our advice line, or our Voices advocacy programme.
We want to change that. Chest Heart & Stroke Scotland’s renewed vision is of a Scotland where everyone with chest and heart conditions, or after a stroke, can live their life well, receiving the right support at the right time and in the right place.
To achieve our goal, we have this week launched a new strategy – No Life Half Lived. It sets out how we will do that, focusing on addressing the unmet needs – social, emotional and physical – of people with our conditions across Scotland’s diverse communities.
We want to support people to breathe better, for their hearts to work as well as they can, and to make sure they get the support to recover from their stroke as best they can. We need your support, whether that’s in donating items to our shops or a making a financial donation.
Most of our income comes from our fundraising, our retail shops, and trusts and legacies. The nature of our work is often quiet, hidden, and
even unglamorous. It isn’t to us – and we know that every interaction can make a world of difference.
We will never underestimate the power of a cup of tea, a conversation started, and a recovery begun. Jane-claire Judson, CEO, Chest Heart & Stroke Scotland.