Welcome to Living Well with MS Coffee Break #14, where we are pleased to welcome Katy Deacon as our guest!

Our Coffee Break series is your chance to get to know members of our diverse OMS community. In each episode, you’ll join Geoff Allix for an intimate chat with a different member of our global community. Our guests will share their personal stories and talk about their challenges and victories, large and small. We hope you find common cause and a source of inspiration from the stories of these very special people.

As always, your comments and suggestions are always welcome by emailing [email protected]. We hope you enjoy this episode’s conversation with Katy, beaming to you straight from the United Kingdom.

Bio:

Katy is a Chartered Electrical Engineer, a wife and mother to two young children. She enjoyed her work project managing the installation of renewable energy systems and overseeing building energy management up until her MS symptoms appeared nine years ago. Katy still works full time, but she changed her technical focus as the inability to walk restricts the amount of scrambling around building sites that one can do.

Questions:

• Katy, our audience wants to know a little bit about you and your life. Can you share some background on where you’re from, what you do, any snippets of your family or personal life or anything about you that would give our listeners a sense of who Katy is?
• How about your experience with MS? Can you provide some context on that? When were you diagnosed and how did you initially cope with it?
• At which point did you come across the OMS program? How was that experience for you? Why did you decide to start following it?
• What are some of the challenges you’ve faced at first in adopting the OMS program? How did you overcome them?
• When did you first start to see any kind of positive indicators in following OMS guidelines? What were these?
• You have experienced some mobility issues. Can you share some of your experiences in dealing with these and how you’ve learned to adapt?
• How have you had to adapt your daily healthy habits to the new realities imposed by Covid-19? And has following the OMS program helped you deal with the new realities of Covid-19 times?
• On a personal note, do you have any unusual interests or wacky hobbies you can tell us about? What kind of stuff will we find you doing on a weekend?
• If there is one piece of advice you can share with people new to the OMS program, what would that be?

Katy’s Favorite Links:

• Backup Trust’s wheelchair skills app and website are excellent resources for new wheelchair users who might need some additional training and support.
• Apple Watch’s activity goals are great – Katy is an achievement-focused person and the Apple Watch tracks her pushes.
• Powering a manual wheelchair can be tough, so Katy has found these strengthening techniques really useful.
• Katy likes the MyFitnessPal app for tracking food intake.
• Katy loves this checklist for healthy eating from Veganuary.
• Foothold is a UK support charity Katy is proud to be involved with.
• This is a great blog entry Katy wrote for OMS in 2019.

Coming up on our next episode:

On the next episode of Living Well with MS, join us for a very special interview with Overcoming MS Chair and charity founder Linda Bloom, who discusses her own personal journey on the OMS Program and how it paved the way to the founding of a charity that has touched the lives of thousands of people with MS around the world. This moving and illuminating interview launches on March 31, 2021, so please tune in.

Don’t miss out:

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