| Disabled cruisers need to plan ahead
Cruise-bound travelers with disabilities, especially wheelchair users, can't take anything for granted. While cruise lines profess to be wheelchair-user friendly, there are instances where they are not. For anyone with a serious disability who is interested in cruising, full disclosure of your problem to the cruise line or travel agent doing the booking is a must. Every cruise line has a toll-free number and guest access specialists to help passengers with disabilities, whether it's a wheelchair issue, a hearing or sight impairment, questions about oxygen for those with respiratory problems or other medical problems. Ask the cruise line or your travel agent questions until the answers are crystal clear to you and you feel comfortable embarking on a new experience.
SCAT cuts make disabled into unwilling homebodies
Sheila Trexler's parents live on the opposite side of Guilford County from her home at Bell House, a center for disabled adults near the old Carolina Circle Mall on Summit Avenue. But they might as well live on the other side of the world.
"I'm only getting home once a year because I have no way to get there," she said.
Trexler can't visit her parents' home because it sits outside - just outside - the official city limits, a point beyond which the SCAT bus she uses for transportation will not venture. Instead her parents visit her at Bell House and sometimes they meet closer to town, at the Wal-Mart on Wendover Avenue or the Four Seasons Mall.
Trexler, like many of the other Bell House residents, uses a motorized wheelchair to get around. Her disability hasn't kept her from securing a job at Wal-Mart, where she works three or four times a week, or participating at Reedy Fork Baptist Church.
Getting back to basics
His career as a professional hockey player had stalled and Duncan Milroy knew he had to do something to jump start it again. So when Hamilton Bulldogs head coach Don Lever suggested to him at the end of last year that the best thing he could do to impress the Montreal Canadiens was to start by getting in the best shape of his life, Milroy took the message to heart. The 23-year-old Edmonton native spent two months this summer in St. Louis working with the Blues strength and conditioning coach Nelson Ayotte. His weight is down about eight pounds but Milroy has added muscle and reduced his body fat by about 4 per cent. The new, svelte, Duncan Milroy says he feels better both as a person and as a hockey player. "That's the reason he got in a game in Montreal during training camp," said Lever, who feels that Milroy has to continue to build on his apparent new commitment to his career.
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