Prepping With Disabilities
Prepping with disabilities is challenging, especially when SHTF. Although prepping adequately is crucial to survival, everyone agrees that a disabled prepper needs to take extra care or caution while at it. Surviving emergencies can be stressful as well; you know that.
Luckily, prepping is for everyone, regardless of the disability. There are various strategies and resources aimed at easing prepping for disabled persons.
Why Is Prepping With Disabilities Different?
Most people don’t realize how common disabilities are. A recent CDC report reveals that nearly 54 million Americans are disabled in one impactful way or the other. It is reported that 12% of American adults have moving disability, and that’s just for immobility. Throw in the cases for sight, hands, and you see the percentage rising.
There are unique challenges to every disability, with each often requiring special medications, equipment, and care to manage. Sometimes, in extreme cases, a disability can make it exceptionally difficult (if not impossible) for a person to perform his day-to-day routine. Now, imagine how challenging it can be when in a survival situation.
Whereas most people simply stock their emergency kit regularly and depend on their survival instincts and skill to get by when the chips are down, this is never enough for a prepper with disability. When you’re disabled, you have to work out special ways to survive unique situations. Sometimes, it could be beating the approaching storm to get to the basement or something as basic as managing your equipment or medications or just moving around.
General Recommendations For Prepping With Disabilities
As mentioned before, there are various types of disabilities, each of which has to be managed through specific means and strategies. It is, therefore, impossible to recommend a particular thing that’ll work for every disabled prepped. However, some general rules and guidelines work for all types of disabilities. So, as you prep with your disability, pay attention to these suggestions.
Recognize Your Limits
Typically, every disabled person knows his limits, i.e., what he can and cannot do, which is why they can live fine and even thrive living their normal lives, notwithstanding their physical or mental shortcomings. However, all these change in a survival situation. When it comes down to prepping, your limitations aren’t what they used to be. To this end, you must be able to identify what will be a stumbling block beforehand.
Figure out what your primary challenges will be if you have to be shut in your home for weeks and perhaps months or if you have to get away to a storm shelter built just in your backyard. Or you could just work out what would be most difficult for you to do if you had to survive a fire outbreak.
Thinking ahead of all these will help you identify your Achilles heel early enough, thus giving you the benefit of planning and sufficient leverage to scale through any difficulty.
Maximize Your Strengths
Listening to people go on and on about their limitations is an all too familiar story, and that’s perhaps the major problem of everyone these days. We prefer to focus on what we cannot do, thereby neglecting what we can do. This can be a significant delimitation for disabled persons because they are often guided by others who tell them what and what not to do.
Listen to me: living with a disability does not make you useless… far from it! If only you’d focus on it, you’d realize plenty of your strengths that could even give you an advantage while prepping. The main trick here is to know what these strengths are and how to capitalize on them to aid survival.
For example, you may be an expert with needle and thread, meaning that you can make clothes in no time at all. Alternatively, you may be a wonderful gardener who understands the core basics of gardening and can thus help grow outstanding vegetables and nuts.
Although these skills may be pretty insignificant in normal life, they can be the difference between life and death in dire situations. Additionally, you can barter your skills for essentials during survival situations.
Join A Pack
The default thinking of most while pre-planning for emergencies is how they can survive alone, especially when they don’t live with family. And while we agree that it is important to be able to survive on your own, there are always some benefits in doing so with others.
So, if you don’t feel confident enough about surviving alone, there’s no shame in belonging to a pack. Disabled or not, this is something every prepper should do. Your pack should be a close-by group of persons who help.
In the absence of family or close friends, you can always reach out to your local prepper pack. Alternatively, you can source for survivalists with whom you can establish a survival group.
Attend To Your Stockpile Requirements
Most people with special conditions, such as disabilities or chronic diseases, have to use various medications to stay healthy and in control. Whereas this may look like a casual thing you do daily, it can become much more significant in a survival situation. You have to make sure your supplies will be enough if disaster strikes and cuts you off from your source. Unluckily though, it is rarely possible to stockpile prescription medications, particularly when they are expensive or controlled.
The ideal suggestion is to have medications that can last for at least six months. In case you have some problems doing this, you can ask your doctor to prescribe drugs of 3 – 6 months for you. And here’s something else: always refill early.
Conclusion On Prepping With Disabilities
Everyone agrees that prepping with disabilities requires unique pre-planning and considerations to see that you are fully equipped to survive for weeks and even months in the absence of the usual supply chain. This entails that prepping with disabilities is just like normal prepping— only some modifications on what you’ll stock and how to get by in challenging situations.