Going to university can be a daunting experience for anyone. When you have a chronic illness, there are often even more concerns and things that need to be considered and planned for. To help make your time at university the best they can be, I thought I’d put together my tips for attending university with chronic illness.
Tips For Attending University With Chronic Illness: Disabled Student’s Allowance
If you’re attending university with a disability or medical condition, you may be entitled to disabled student’s allowance. This is funding for specialist equipment to assist you on your course. Whether it be dictation software, a dictaphone for lectures, or a combination of several different pieces of equipment, the DSA are the people to speak to. I received several pieces of equipment, including a laptop, printer, dictaphone and coloured lamp.
Tips For Attending University With Chronic Illness: Contact Student Services
If your university don’t know that you have a chronic illness, they can’t help you. So making contact with student services can be really beneficial. You may be entitled to extra time in exams, extensions on coursework and several other things, depending on how your chronic illness affects you.
Tips For Attending University With Chronic Illness: Make Contact With The University Doctor’s Surgery
Even if your conditions are stable, you never know when things will change. Making contact with the university’s doctors surgery when things are stable will make it easier if things start to go downhill or you have to change medications. For some people, regular check-ins may be beneficial. My migraine consultant wanted me to have regular check-ins with the university nurse, but unfortunately they weren’t co-operative with this. If they had been, the side effects I experienced when I had to change medication, as well as the deterioration in my basilar type and hemiplegic migraine may have been identified and solved sooner.
Tips For Attending University With Chronic Illness: Consider Your Living Arrangements Carefully
Most universities have halls of residence that are available to all first year students. There are several things to consider with accommodation, which will vary depending on your chronic illness. One of the most important will be how far the halls are from your university buildings.
In terms of the rooms themselves, you may have specific requirements or need adaptations. If lighting is an issue, like it is with my photosensitive migraine and Mears-Irlen syndrome, you may want to find out what lighting halls of residence use. Mine had fluorescent lighting, which is problematic for me. So we bought several lamps and lit my room with those, so I didn’t have to turn the fluorescents on. Whether you need a room on the ground floor, a visual alarm in case of a fire or something else, it’s important to speak to the halls of residence to get the things you need put in place.
It’s also worth being aware that many universities will offer halls of residence to non-first year students, if they have medical need for them.
Tips For Attending University With Chronic Illness: Are You Going To Tell People?
Whether you disclose your disability and/or chronic illness to you peers is entirely up to you. While you shouldn’t feel that you should or shouldn’t disclose this information, it’s important to think carefully about this decision.
Whether you choose to tell your peers about your chronic illness or disability may in part, depend on your condition. As I loose consciousness with my basilar type migraine, I chose to tell the people in my flat about my condition early on. I didn’t want my new friends to be scared if and when I lost consciousness. Telling them that this might happen, and what to do if it did, was as much about their safety as it was mine.
There are pros and cons to telling or not telling people about your chronic illnesses. If you may need medical assistance, it can be helpful to let your new friends know in advance. However, knowing that you have a chronic illness may affect the. way some people interact with you. In my experience this is a small minority of people. If you don’t tell people, you won’t risk being seen as ‘different’ but you run the risk of scaring people and them not knowing what to do if you become ill.
Tips For Attending University With Chronic Illness: How Are You Going To Tell People?
Disclosing your chronic illness and/or disability can be a difficult conversation to have with people you’ve only just met. So it can be helpful to plan what you want to say before hand. Do you want it to be in an informal environment so you can drop into the conversation that you’re chronically ill and allow others to ask questions to facilitate to conversation? Or, do you want to be specific about telling people what to do in an emergency? If it’s the latter, probably avoid having the conversation in a noisy bar or club. Instead, opt for a quiet venue like your kitchen or common area in halls of residence.
When I started uni, we went out for a ‘getting to know each other’ drink at a quiet pub. During this, I dropped my chronic illnesses into the conversation. My flat mates asked me questions, including what they should do if I were to loose consciousness. It was a very relaxed conversation. When I subsequently lost consciousness, my friends were calm, because they knew what to do to help.
Want to know my experiences of attending music college and university with chronic illness? I’ve filmed a YouTube video about it!
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tCImvFYrlU[/embedyt]
What are your tips for attending university with chronic illness?
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*This post was published by Migraine Action in their July 2017 edition of Challenging Migraine.
I’m all about telling professors from the get-go about chronic illness. When I was in my upper-division graphic design major, I couldn’t drive because I had seizures that would suspend my driving for 6 months-1 year. I also had so many health issues and dealing with my dad passing away before getting accepted in the graphic design program. The program was very tough (no one slept!), but my professors were very accepting of that, and I still worked as hard as I could though sometimes I did slack off on my work because of feeling depressed that I couldn’t work or intern like my classmates could due to not driving (where I live, you need a car to get everywhere. The public transportation isn’t the best).
It is good to tell your friends and classmates about your condition, especially if something goes wrong! If they are good friends and good people, they will understand and do their best to help you out. And your flatmates sounded like amazing, compassionate people.
Hannah
Floraful
I’m 100% with you about telling people from the beginning. It’s fantastic that you had supportive professors, that really does make all the difference. I was really lucky with the people around me when I was at music college. Everyone was so supportive! Unfortunately uni was a different story. I did have some supportive friends and lecturers, but they were in the minority. Xx
These are some fantastic tips! I really wish that I’d read a post like yours before I went to university, although this was the time in my life when I started to be affected by the onset of my physical chronic illnesses. I really regret not speaking to Student Services until the final year of my degree because they were able to tell all of my tutors about my conditions and offer a few other services to help me, like time-stop breaks on my exams so I could go to the toilet or get a drink or whatever. My university also didn’t inform me about the DSA until it was too late to receive any help, which is a shame! I decided it was best for me to live in the on-site campus accomodation for all three years of university so that I was close to the library and lecture rooms :) It was important for me when choosing where to study that my uni campus was all in one place, as there are many uni’s where their campus are spread across several buildings all over a town/city.
It was definitely awkward when talking to some of my fellow students about my health conditions. I preferred to just quickly throw in in a conversation that I had these conditions. Some people could be pretty judgemental about the fact that I really struggled more and more thoroughout my course to attend my lectures and by the fact that I had phone anxiety and found presentations impossible to do because of my mental health. I was very lucky in my third year to move in with some fellow spoonies; one of them is one of my closest friends now :) It was lovely that they understood how hard it was to get through university with chronic illness!
Thankyou for sharing this post :) x
Sarah | Raiin Monkey