When a loved one faces an amputation, whether as a result of a war injury, illness, or other accident, the entire family embarks on an emotional journey.  Everyone’s primary concern is the health and welfare of amputee, but family members and spouses often make huge emotional, financial, and personal sacrifices to care for and support their loved one during recovery, and sometimes for the rest of their lives.  Information and guidance about local support networks may be hard to find.  Injured service men and women, in particular, may face a letdown of sorts when they return home from Walter Reed, where they received the best of care and had a support network of peers facing the same issues.  Once home, while they may have a closer network of family members, they also face the demands of home life without the constant interaction with peers and professionals who understand their issues.  This can put even more pressure on family caregivers.

There are probably many people across the country who have had similar experiences and faced similar problems in caring for loved ones who have had amputations.  There is undoubtably much valuable advice that could be shared if there were an easy way for caregivers and family members to communicate.

This blog could serve as a tool to enable this type of communication.  What problems have you faced as a caregiver?  What resources have been particularly helpful?  Are there topics we could cover in this blog that would be helpful to you as a caregiver?

Welcome to the Given Limb Foundation Blog!  We hope this blog will provide amputees and their caregivers a forum for discussing the problems they face everyday, and for sharing ideas and information to help address unmet needs and improve their quality of life.  We welcome and encourage your comments as well as your suggestions for new topics.

Veteran’s Families Seek Aid for Caregiver Role—As the number of seriously injured veterans increases, more and more family members of the wounded are choosing to become full-time caregivers for their loved ones.  But in taking on the role of a full-time caregiver, the family member often has to quit another full-time job and give up important source of the family’s income.  So a growing group of veteran’s families is asking the government to compensate them in place of an outside caregiver.

While the government pays for families to hire outside caregivers, in some cases the companies that provide the care do not meet all of a family’s needs.  Regulations might prohibit contracted caregivers from taking the injured veteran outside the house, or the number of daily hours of care might not be enough to cover the time that a working spouse is away from home.  In some cases the contracted caregivers simply do not provide the quality of care that the family expects.  Legislation has been introduced to congress that would allow families of veterans with traumatic brain injury to be paid for their caretaker roles after receiving training and certification.Click here to see full “New York Times” article.