Turning Disability into Opportunity

Chronic disease can have a profound and devastating effect on its sufferers, limiting mobility, access to work, education, and social opportunities, and generally reducing the sufferer’s overall quality of life. It is hard to make your mark while in constant pain. That there are people who do, who buck the odds and overcome their illness to achieve great things, is something to be recognized and celebrated.

Robin Farmanfarmaian is a best-selling author, a professional speaker on cutting edge medical technology, and as a teenager, she was misdiagnosed with an autoimmune disease. You may imagine that this misdiagnosis had a severe impact on her outlook – particularly after 43 hospitalizations, six major surgeries, and the removal of three organs – and you’d be right. Adolescent disability was the catalyst that launched her into the burgeoning field of medical futurism and patient advocacy.

When Robin was twenty-six, roughly seven years after her large intestine was removed, Robin found that her medical team had reached the end of their usefulness. They put her on 80mg of methadone for the lingering abdominal pain, blaming it on her many surgeries and a “sensitive stomach.” But 80 mg of Methadone was a prescription too far. “I fired my entire healthcare team, took myself off opiates, and found a new healthcare team,” she says. “That was a very, very, very difficult week.”

The decision to take the reins in managing her own healthcare has been the guiding purpose of Robin’s career. “Patients [should] understand that part of this is in their control. And they need to step up and take responsibility.” Robin advocates that patients make the effort to lead their healthcare teams – it’s their body, after all. But most people have no medical training. How can they expect to lead their medical team? It all boils down to knowledge. “You can’t rely on one 10-minute doctor’s visit once or twice a year. You need to know what’s out there.”

By “what’s out there”, Robin means robotics. Or sensor technology, or 3D printing. Using specialized crowd sourcing, the medical technology field has seen a boom in treatment/therapeutic advances, and patients need to be the ones leading the charge toward them.

Leading the charge doesn’t have to be confined to the medical team. Robin first took control of her medical situation, and then applied the same level of assertiveness to the rest of her life until it had spread to so many different areas that she could use it to write a book and launch her speaking career. “Turn everything into an opportunity,” she says, and references Amy Mullins – a double leg amputee with a set of robotic legs that let her run faster than most of the world. Robin is in near constant pain, but she and Amy have taken their disabilities and transformed them into opportunities.

You might scoff – of course they’ve made lemonade out of lemons. Lemons were all they had. But the truth is that “disability” isn’t confined to your legs or your organs or your immune system. Every disadvantage you’ve hit, every roadblock, every disappointment, is a potential opportunity. Robin prescribes an exercise for recalibrating your attitude. Go get a piece of paper and make a list. Write out the thing that has held you back all this time at the top. Beneath it, write a list of ways you can turn that disadvantage into an opportunity. Don’t stop until you’ve hit twenty.

Robin did it. So can you.

Listen to my podcast interview with Robin here: https://www.theartistevolution.com/businessleadershipseries/bls/interview-robin-farmanfarmaian-author-patient-ceo/