Susan's Story

Up until now, I’ve been living in my family home on the Central Coast. Although I have an amazing family and my home was mainly accessible to live in, I still found myself struggling with daily care options and availability. Living with Multiple Sclerosis, I was unable to move freely around the home in my wheelchair as a traditional house just isn’t built to allow for easy wheelchair travel! I also can’t move by myself and that really means someone from my family or care team needs to be with me for the majority of the day.

Now that I’m in my Ability Apartment, help is on hand to me at all times either through my own personal care team or because of the onsite overnight SIL Team. They can help me if I need anything through the night and it’s an amazing feeling to know that there’s someone there who’s properly trained and available to support me when needed. I feel more confident calling on my team and less concerned about asking my family for help. When I see them now, we really just get to enjoy our time together as a family.

Apart from the onsite support, I simply love the way the apartment is designed and built. The wide doors and hallways in the apartment make daily life and movement a blessing to me. The inside of the apartment is set up for people with disabilities of course, but I love that the rest of the building is too.

It gives me more control over my environment and has renewed my sense of independence. You don’t realise just how much you used to bump into things like walls, doors and furniture until you stop doing it every 5 minutes! It’s actually so liberating to move around in a custom-built space. I absolutely love reading, doing crosswords and watching movies and now I’m in control of when and how I do all of those things again.

I first learned about the Ability Apartments through my NDIS support coordinator. Both she and my son took part in organizing the application for me and I’m so grateful for all their help. The application process was tough and so was waiting for approval and waiting for the apartment to become available to me. That process is longer than you think it’ll be so it’s well-worth getting the process going as soon as you can.

I was pretty confident that I would be approved for the funding, but it was still a complicated process. There’s not much you can do to speed up the mandatory checks, steps and processes so my advice to anyone wanting to explore independent living in an Ability Apartment, is just do it and don’t wait!