Resilience
Chronically ill patients’ subjective well-being does not have to be affected by new impairments if they develop successful coping strategies to deal with the problems they face in their daily lives [9,20]. Resilience is crucial in this. Huber et al. have already proposed to view health as ‘the ability to adapt and to self-manage’ [20]. Although studies on successful coping with PD emphasize that patients need to accept that they have a chronic disease that will inevitably lead to disabilities and limitations, and that they need to be realistic about their possibilities, yet search for solutions that limit the impact of disabilities and limitations on one’s personal life, symptoms such as apathy and fatigue challenge patients in their resilience [12,13,21–23]. We were, therefore, pleasantly surprised to find out that most patients in our study were able to independently cope with the problems they encountered by making adaptations in their contexts such as a reconstruction of the bathroom or the purchase of an electric shaver. They anticipated and initiated changes in care themselves, not willing to wait until the disease would take over control by forcing the change to happen. This importance of being in control is in line with other literature on coping with chronic diseases and seems to be independent of the type of disease patients suffer from and the type or complexity of change encountered [6,7,24,25].