With the upcoming Paralympics, I hope to help draw attention to the event and those participating in it. If anyone knows a Paralympic athlete who would like to share his/her experiences, let me know. Or if you play wheelchair/adaptive or women’s sports and want me to know about your team, results or player profiles, please pass the information on via Twitter (below) or in the comments over at the blog.

Full entry: We Push Sports

R-word.org

We are not, she said, adequately housed. Contact your MP (Member of Parliament), she advised. And, having exhausted other avenues and being very suggestible, that is exactly what we did.

Full entry: Cometh the Man

There’s a pervasive myth that annoys the hell out of me, and I hope you’ll excuse me while I get it out of my system: it’s the idea that it’s ok for an institution to put in new inaccessible facilities as long as it also has some accessible ones elsewhere.

Full entry: Why separate resources ain’t good enough

When Exercises for people with MS was launched in 2004 it was the first publication designed to build on the evidence that exercise was good for people with MS. It offered people with MS and health professionals simple guidance about appropriate exercise regimes. Since that time, in excess of 45,000 copies have been sent out.

To enable more people to have access to this information and to enable health professionals to provide a more tailored approach, the book has been transferred to this web based format.

The exercises are arranged in categories based both on how they are done and the type of problems they address. Each exercise includes clear, attractive diagrams, and an animation to illustrate the movement. The option to download each individual page allows the compilation of a personalised set of exercises to meet particular needs and to suit lifestyle.

One memorable year (football fans will probably remember which year it was, I don’t), we strolled down the middle of Route 123 in downtown McLean, Virginia with not a car in sight.

But it has its downside. Last year, we went out to dinner, only to find that the restaurant decided to close on the spur of the moment due to lack of customers.

Last night we wanted pizza, and we discovered that there was a new sit-down pizza place nearby. I called them. Yes, they were open. Yes, they did have a couple of small televisions, but the sound would be off (the last thing your Superbowl-avoider wants is to wind up in a sports bar with a gazillion large screen TVs going at full blast).

As promised, there were two small televisions, but the volume was on. On one of them, the volume was up to the point where my husband and I couldn’t comfortably carry on a conversation. There were no other customers. I asked the server if she would turn down the TV. Her face twisted. She hesitated. “Normally we have them on mute,” she said, “but with the big game, the staff want to be able to…”

“Maybe the staff need their own TV,” I suggested.

“Oh, no, then they wouldn’t get any work done!”

She agreed to turn it down, but I could tell it pained her. We ate and paid as fast as possible, and went across the street to Baskin-Robbins for dessert, as I’m sure they wanted me out of their Superbowl as fast as possible.

You have to make a reservation one to two days in advance. That means knowing not only when you’ll be ready to set out, but also where your first stop will be, how long it will last, where your second stop will be, how long that will last, and so on. What if the doctor is running late? Or the movie is a dud? Too bad.

Unless your doorway has a direct view of the curb, you have to wait outside. Tom Charles, the M.T.A.’s vice president for paratransit, said that 95 percent of departures are on time — but “on time” means within a half-hour. Half an hour is a long time to wait on the sidewalk. If you have a serious disability and it’s 34 degrees and raining, it can be downright painful.

Full article: A Godsend, Except When It’s Not

I scoot up, I wrassle my legs up the wall, and I’m holding them up there by pressing my palms against my knees. I let go experimentally, and my knees bend and my heels start sliding down the wall. “You’re going to have to hold my feet up,” I say.

Now I don’t know if my trainer had a bad experience with too many sexual harassment awareness classes, or something worse, but he’s very reluctant to actually touch me, even though I signed the part of the form that said that I understood that personal training might involve some actual touching, so he takes hold of the ends of my pants legs in order to keep my legs up on the wall.

I start doing crunches, holding the 12 pound medicine ball up at arm’s length, and I’m thinking that if my feet start to slide down the wall, his instinctive reaction will probably be to pull up on my pants legs, and my stretchy pants will just be whipped right off. And I’m trying to remember if I’m wearing pink underwear today (as if black underwear would somehow make me less conspicuous).

And I start laughing so hard, imagining this scenario, that I drop the medicine ball on my face.

So be careful out there – exercise can be dangerous!

We were met by another NSCD volunteer, Rick, and he and Sherry conferred about which of the available sit-skis might work best for me. The one he brought out looked good, so I transferred into it (nice and snug!), got strapped in, and off we went. Sherry showed me how to get moving by pushing off with my poles.

Sherry checking out my sit-ski

Sherry and me on the trail

It was a beautiful sunny day, in the mid-twenties, which meant that within a few minutes I was plenty hot. I shed my winter coat, my hat, my bike jacket, and eventually my gloves. Rick, who accompanied us, was soon loaded down with all my discards. The sit-ski has two skis, so it should be pretty stable, but I overbalanced on my first two turns and tipped right over onto my side (sorry, no pictures – I did tell Rick that if I tipped over again, in the interests of journalism, he should take a picture first, and pick me up afterwards). Once I’d gotten the first two falls over with, it was smooth sledding.

Out of the goodness of her heart (and desire not to make me completely crabby the first time out), Sherry chose a relatively flat course, but it still took a lot of arm power to muscle up even a mild slope. On the uphills, Rick attached a long, flexible tether to the front of my ski so that he could belay me if I started slipping back downhill (luckily, it did not come to that). On the downhills, he tethered the back of my ski, so that I wouldn’t careen out of control.

Frequent rests were key

Back at the ranch, the truly difficult part of our day awaited us – Rick brought back our chairs and we had to get across about four yards of snow to the picnic tables! Then we relaxed and had some lunch, and watched the other skiers (it was a race weekend, so there was lots of activity).

Sit-ski, poles, tether

Katja, Rick and Sherry