Make Your Plan

After taking some time to assess your health status and how your disease state will affect your life, it is important to spend some time mapping your own priorities and goals. Some individuals may simply want to attack the disease full boar and head on and may not be terribly concerned about the short-term impact on their daily lives. Others may be more interested in maintaining or improving their quality of life than eradicating their disease. Once you’ve determined these goals, the question becomes: how do you make changes? At that point, delineating a personal plan can be incredibly helpful.

Your plan should incorporate all of the factors that you’ve identified as important to your own goals. Remember, all of the elements that are covered on this site are interconnected and can have a real impact on your health. So it is important that you not limit your plan to basic items such as medications and treatment plans, though these will likely be a vital part of most people’s plans. Simply spending more time with your family or anything else that might have a positive impact on your health, put it in your plan. Sometimes, just putting these ideas down in some concrete form can be a good first step towards accomplishing them.

Check in with yourself, see how you’re doing, give yourself a pat on the back for the things that are working, and rethink those that don’t seem to be. Don’t be afraid to modify your plan or add things to it at any time. A successful plan will be a living thing that will grow and change and be a constant partner along your journey.