Meet Dan – A tenacious, young man living life to the fullest. Dan was born with aggressive liver cancer that soon spread to his legs. Sadly this meant that Dan would have to undergo major surgery to have his right leg amputated at the age of just 18 months old.
Growing up, Dan experienced frustration and anger when faced with the reality that he couldn’t run around and play football like his friends.
Hearing that he couldn’t do something, gave him more passion and a fire in his belly to get out there and “do it anyway.”
Dan now plans to use this energy to help and support others who find themselves in a similar position.
Accessing the community with pride and independence to grab a few groceries in and around the Gold Coast area is just one of the ways the caring Goal Facilitators at Blue Wing Care Professionals support Dan.
Dan feels comfort in how the Blue Wing Support Workers assist him by not making him feel disabled, but rather an independent and able person.
Read the Blue Wing NDIS Disability Service transcript here:
Hi, welcome to the Blue Wing show, where we’re going to talk about relief, support, care, and family for our participants. It is our mission to show you there is help and support and people that care about the individuals.
So, I was born with cancer, liver cancer to start with. It spread to my legs. I had a second sighting after I had a resection.
And how old when this happened?
So, from birth and I lost the leg at the age of 18 months.
My name is Dan Gregory, I’m 24. My disability is that I’m an amputee. I would have started realising when my friends around me started running and becoming more active and football and stuff like that.
I started realising I couldn’t do that as such.
That’s when I started to realise it sort of kicked in. I got pretty angry and frustrated just seeing my friend’s doing things at the time that I wished I could have done so you know probably didn’t deal with it in the best way possible.
Trauma doesn’t define you.
Daniel is an amputee, but he also struggles with PTSD trauma and some mental health. He is independent but he does need assistance.
And I think he was in denial for a long time and didn’t realise that the assistance was out there until he came to Blue Wing Care Professionals.
My name is Natalie, I’ve been working with Blue Wing for going on two years now. Daniel’s really motivating, he’s very self-independent on his own. It’s more so just about enabling him and assisting him where be.
Basically, the way my family brought me up I was naturally competitive regardless of my leg. So many times, in my life I’ve been told I couldn’t do something.
The minute I hear that I’d do the opposite. That was for me, very hard to sort of swallow my pride as such and allow other people to help me in places that I knew deep down I needed a hand with, but I didn’t necessarily want to admit to it.
Results
So, coming across Blue Wing, they were definitely able to help me with that and not make me feel disabled when I did get the help. We really focus on clients achieving their goals not only within themselves but external things they want to work on like sports or hobbies.
It’s very goal-oriented so if they want to do something we’ll make it happen. One of the main ones I find is that people forget you are human.
They don’t, sometimes they’ll look at you differently or treat you differently. The other thing would be people presume you’re fragile, not as capable or driven to do things.
So Blue Wing is different in the fact that, a lot of NDIS Disability Service providers say they care and what not and might show a front and such but they actually back what they say.
They just genuinely care, they put in the effort and the time to see things through.
Future
My vision for the future would be to somehow help people on my route, that I’ve been on. Help them not take no for an answer and do what they want to do, somehow.
I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to go about that, but support people like me. Put a smile on people’s faces.
For more inforation about Blue Wing’s NDIS Disability Services checkout our About Us video.
