Thanks to coverage on my local radio station of choice, Fresh FM, Tuesday December 3 is International Day of People with Disability (http://www.idpwd.com.au/).

I actually hadn’t heard of this before, despite the fact I’ve had my awesome leg of awesomeness since I was a year or two old, so it was great to hear it getting a bit of exposure, and I thought I’d try and do my bit to promote it and talk about it. Particularly special was that Melissa Noonan, co-founder of Limbs 4 Life (a not-for-profit organisation supporting amputees through peer-support programs and an excellent website with forums for people to post in), was a recipient of of the 2009 Social Inclusion Award for all of her hard work helping out fellow amputees and their loved ones.

I think in the lead up to next year’s day I’ll see if there’s something I can get involved in to help out or just celebrate the day. Hopefully this little plug here will wander out into the various search indexes floating online to draw attention to the event, as I think it’s an extremely worthwhile cause.

In the meantime, I’d encourage you to check out the International Day of People with Disability website (http://www.idpwd.com.au/), as well as Limbs 4 Life (http://www.limbs4life.com/). I’ll be adding links to both sites to the side navigation after I post this up.

Bloginated Thursday, 26th November 2009 / Prosthesis or amputee stuff
Tag-isms: amputee | Amputees doing cool stuff | International Day of People with Disability | Limbs 4 Life | Melissa Noonan

As the heading suggests, I’m in a very mature and rational mood 😛 Was heading home from work yesterday looking forward to jumping into a good session last night at the dojo, and thought – “My stump feels a bit funny, I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with the prosthesis though”. By the time I got home and walked out the car though, I knew it was happening again – much like the problems I was having with my leg last week, where I thought the skin had healed over the split in my skin, it was in fact splitting open again. I was actually pretty confident that it was on the mend, but I must have gotten ahead of myself; I should have kept the bandaids over the wound a little longer, but to be honest, it was probably the great little training session I did on Tuesday that started undoing all the good I’d achieved by taking it easy over the course of the last week and a half.

The bummer is that this throws my training regime completely up in the air, as it means I definitely won’t be able to train outside of class, and wholistically, I definitely won’t be able to grade before the end of the year. I know martial isn’t all about the grading, but I like to set goals and achieve them, and am a little bummed that I’ll be falling behind that target I thought I could achieve. Not that it’s really something I could have avoided as I didn’t know the wound hadn’t completely healed over, but still, it’s a bit disappointing.

Still, all the extra effort has not gone to waste by any means – all training is good training, after all – so I’ve now revised my goal to grade up by the end of Q1 2010, and will try to train hard and get myself to a level of expertise so I can grade again before the end of next year.

Bloginated Thursday, 26th November 2009 / Prosthesis or amputee stuff
Tag-isms: grading | Injuries | prosthesis | setbacks | sores | stump | stupid injuries | training