Personal Narrative: Living With Disabilities

Improved Essays
When I hear the term disability, I think of the past experiences I have had with individuals living with disabilities. I have had many experiences with people who are living with disabilities. I have volunteered to work with people who have disabilities and I also am associated with people who have disabilities through friendships and family members. Since my experience have been with a large variety of age ranges, I have chosen a few to outline. These include children, young adults, and the elderly. My experiences with people who have disabilities have affected my view of the term to what it is today. I also think about our current definition, which looks at a disability as the result of a condition or impairment. In the past, I had …show more content…
Throughout the session of the program each volunteer was paired up with one child who was living with a disability. Sometimes if it was a more severe disability we would be paired with a high schooler. One example of this was a high schooler with Down Syndrome, however the majority were children with disabilities. During my sophomore and junior I was paired with a seven year old child named John Michael. John Michael who had severe emotional and behavioral problems. He would act out in his classes and afterschool at the program verbally and physically. He would throw things, shout at other students, and even make threats against them. Working with John Michael has given me lots of experience working with kids that have behavioral problems. I know that by having my experience with him, it will help me in the future with my …show more content…
My grandmother suffers from dementia that set in at about seventy-five years old. She is now eighty-six and it has gotten progressively worse during that time period. She has trouble remembering who people are along with what their names are. She is better with her children’s names and her long term memories than she is with other people and more recent memories. This was and still is difficult for me to go through because I have known my grandmother all my life and have seen this type of cognitive disability of her dementia change her over

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