ED&I Hats

I'm gathering hats these days!

For a few years now I have been on the committee for the disability staff network at my work. For those of you know me predominantly through my role with the HSP Support Group, those HSP activities are all voluntary, I also have a salaried job which keeps me busy during the day! I work for Atkins (https://www.atkinsglobal.com/homepage) and there is a staff network here for people with disabilities. Atkins has recently become a Disability Confident employer, and we're working on: helping those without disabilities understand more about what it means to have a disability, providing a supportive community which people with or affected by a disability can take part in, and making sure that the companies policies and procedures are appropriate for those with disabilities.

Actually, there is nice matching between the staff networks and the protected characteristics of the Equalities Act, so what our group does for disability, other groups do for gender, ethnicity, parenthood and so on.

My latest hat is for the ED&I group which is being set up by the Institute of Acoustics (https://www.ioa.org.uk/). My profession at Atkins is an acoustician, and I am a member of the IOA, which is the professional body for those working in/with acoustics in the UK. The ED&I group at the IOA is aiming to cover all of the different areas where people face inequality or exclusion. Naturally, I bring a disability perspective to this group which complements the perspectives of the others on the group, and between us we start with nearly all of those protected characteristics covered.

You can see a photo of our initial meeting (held virtually, of course) here:

I borrowed this pic from this tweet: https://twitter.com/TheANC73/status/1407286245903015947/photo/1. Angela who took the photo is the IOA diversity champion, and was invited to take over the Association of Noise Consultants twitter for international women in engineering day (INWED).

Those that haven't seen me for a while may note that I am wearing glasses in this picture. These are my latest "getting older" accessory!

Symptoms Update

 Hi,

Just a brief post today. In the last week or two I had an on-line appointment with a neuro-physio (following from the discussion I had about this with the National last year). We went through the majority of my stretches, and I'm pleased to say that these are all pretty much in line with what I need to do, and I'm maintaining a good range of movement in my joints.

There are two variations I need to make - for my calf stretches I need to keep my body more upright, and I need to try and introduce more calf stretches during the day. Essentially, when I was doing two sets of stretches a day that was better, but out of them all the calf ones are most relevant. These are most relevant because I default to walking around the house on my toes rather than getting my heels down.

I was encouraged to keep up with my cycling and other activities so that I maintain my cardiovascular health. We discussed baclofen, and the decision is that I dont need this yet. This decision gets reviewed as I find things becoming more difficult.

In other symptoms, I feel I'm suffering a bit from fatigue more at the moment. I think this isnt entirely an HSP thing though. On the HSP front I'm needing to go to the toilet more in the night which disrupts my sleep more. On the non-HSP front, amongst other things, I'm busy with the combination of working, being a parent, chairing the HSP support group, trying to keep healthy, and attempting to squeeze some fun activities in as well. Time to relax seems hard to find.

Update: 22nd June - I also wanted to note that generally speaking my left shoe has been wearing out quicker than my right shoe, which could suggest that my left leg muscles are tighter than my right leg muscles. Whilst the evidence suggests that is true for walking, it is not true in all cases. For example, when I am in the shower, I find it easier to clean the bottom of my left foot than the bottom of my right foot, suggesting the opposite - right leg muscles are tighter than left leg muscles. 

My conclusion is that the more spastic muscles in my left leg are just different from the more spastic muscles in my right leg. I'll keep an eye out for change over time and spot any other left-right differences - e.g. seeing if it is more easy/difficult getting on/off the other side of my bike, or favouring a certain leg first going up/down stairs.

I have now also re-started a short set of evening stretches, just a few for 5 mins. Seems that I prefer the routine rather than the ad-hoc when it comes to stretching.