Adventures traveling

Until I went to a conference last fall I had ne real idea how travel on in a wheelchair worked. I had read that you notified the airlines that you were traveling with a wheelchair and that special arrangements would be made. We did all of that. Then there followed a lot of reading.

Wheelchair passengers need to show up early and are boarded before other passengers on the flight. You stay in the wheelchair until you reach the end of the jetway, At that point the gimp is transferred to a smaller chair narrow enough to get down the aisle of the plane. In the meantime, you advised to remove as many removable parts as possible from the chair to give the airline fewer opportunities to lose parts. Ideally, you end up in a seat near the front of the plane (less distance to travel) and next to the window (you certainly cannot move to let a passenger closer to the window get up.

At the end of the flight, the airline makes sure your wheelchair is at the end of the jetway when you leave the plane after all of the other passengers have exited. On my first flights to Cincinnati, that is exactly the way the system worked,

We next took a trip for pleasure to visit my brother in law in Florida – same idea – same drill. The first flight was from Seattle to Huston. We got to Huston and there was no wheelchair. At this point we remembered the warnings we had read about the glitches that might arise – the wheelchair might be delivered to baggage claim (so how do you get there??) or worse – one person described how the wheelchair was found out at the curb – as someone else might have gotten into a car or taxi.

Needless to say, Verna read them the riot act. After some time the airline rounded up people who had helped unload the plane. One young man remembered a woman who insisted that MY wheelchair was the one the airline had ordered for her and piut herself in the chair (minus cushion or armrests) and had him wheel her from concourse C to a flight on concourse E. He then left the chair at concourse E.

Fortunately we had a good deal of time to make the connection and even more fortunately the chair remained where he left it. After that Verna made sure to get off as early as possible and stand next to the chair to guard against a repeat incident. Does the world need a Lo-Jack system for wheelchairs.

Before we travel again I will have a sign made:

This Wheelchair is the Personal Property

of Steve Lewis

It is NOT the chair the airline ordered for you!!!

Using the Shower

The Gimp and his Gizmos – D

While able bodied folks can stand in the shower, showering when disabled is more of a challenge. First of all, moving your body through a stream of water is not a real option. It is much better to install a head on a hose and move the water over your body. Placing the hose in a holder at  body level makes accessing the stream simpler.

Equally important is the ability to put stream down in a way where it is both off of the body and not spraying into the room. This allows you to get your body wet and than free up a hand to soap up. The the water can be picked up for a rinse.

In theory, the chair can be placed close enough to the controls to allow a gimp to reach over and either turn the water on and off or raise and lower the temperature. In practice there is no way to access that end of the shower in our current bathroom. This means that the controls are several feet from where I am sitting.

This shows the seat I use for taking a shower together with the bar and the hose hung on it. The use of a toilet seat allows me to wash the my nether regions. The two handles allow me to balance well as well as to transfer to and from the chair.

After considering several options we found a tool for turning on and off lawn sprinklers with valves in the ground (see below). It solves the problem for the able bodied turned 90 degrees with the distance being vertical rather then horizontal. The detail shows one of the handles (for turning on the water) with the tool in the process of turning the other handle.

 

Sitting in my chair I reach out with the tool and hook it over one of two handles on the shower control. The outer handle controls whether the water is on or not. The inner one controls the temperature.

 

 

I put the stream where it is pointed into the shower and away from me. Then I turn on the water and wait, occasionally feeling the stream with my hand until it is warm. I then reach over and adjust the temperature. Always, the water is first used on the parts of my body which have feeling and only later on the insensitive portions.

 

 

With these tools, I am able , once I am seated in the chair, to turn on the shower, adjust it, turn it off and reach for a towel. The tool  is even long enough to reach a selector valve which diverts water from the shower head into the hose. Fortunately, that action involves pushing the valve since with that tool I lack the ability to pull.

It is amazing how much independence a few simple tools can give us.

The Hot Tub

The Gimp and his Gizmos – C

Ever since the accident that put me in the wheelchair I have been tempted by the hot tub on our deck. The tub sits on the deck with the rim 34 inches high. The seat of my wheelchair is 22 inches high. In order to get into the hot tub I need to raise my butt about a foot above the wheelchair and over the water and then get out reversing the process.

Initially we considered a standard Hoyer patient lift. There is a picture in an earlier blog. The problem was that the lift was designed to roll under whatever the patient wanted to transfer to (think bed). The tub sits off the deck and initially we thought that we could simply slide the Hoyer’s legs under the tub. Unfortunately a simple experiment found that there was not enough room for the legs to fit and that in any case the cuts required to roll the legs under the tub might weaken the entire structure.

What was needed was not a lift that rolled but one that stayed in one place and rotated, We tried, unsuccessfully to modify the Hoyer to rotate with the thought that the legs could easily bolt to the deck. Unfortunately the engineers who designed the lift would never allow such unsafe behavior.

I mentioned my issue to a friend and he had a great suggestion. He said he had a hoist designed to bring an engine into a pickup truck. It was very heavy duty, rotates 360 degrees and was a fraction of the price of the Hoyer. I found the device at a local tool shop.

The only problem was bolting it to the deck. My brother in law looked up the formula for torque and calculated the torque as 500 foot pounds – too much to simply bolt into a set of 2 x 4s . One idea was to bolt the lift to an iron plate and then bolt the plate to the deck. My brother in law was all for the lift but insisted on running 12 inch bolts through the mail support beams of the deck. He was doing the work so I was not about to argue.

My friend suggested a great metal market in the industrial section of town which was happy to sell us an iron plate exactly sized span the support beams of the deck. We then took the iron to my friend’s drill press and made holes for bolting the lift to the plate and the plate to the support beams of the deck. Finally we bought some 30 inch drill bits to make holes in the beams for the support bolts. By the time we had finished nothing short of destruction of the b=deck would move the lift.

Now it is time for a trial. I roll up to the liift in a house coat and swim trunks.

Next I lift while my wife places the sling under me. Then I hook the sling to the chains attaching it to the lift. The sling is the same one we got with the Hoyer patient lift.

Next, Verna pumps up the lift (really a cleverly attached car jack) to raise me.

Then she swings me over the tub.

and I am lowered in – staying in the sling and on the lift for stability and safety.

Mission accomplished.

The Lift

The Gimp and his Gizmos – B

Most of our  house has been made accessible.The houses two floors but the second was small and I was willing to abandon it.The entry however  was a much larger problem.There are three that you down to the front porch.There are two steps leading down from the garage. Using the formula that a ramp will require one foot of length for each inch of drop, this would require a ramp 16 feet long inside the house.This length was clearly unusable.

We built a ramp along the side of the house which allowed me to get out of the carand flow around to the back deck coming in through the back door.This works well enough but the back door is not really a good way to get into the house. I had to get out of the car in the rain and because the back door does not have a lock it must be unlocked from the inside.

Clearly the answer in the long term was a way to get down the two steps from the garage.After a false start which will be described in another blog entry, we bought a lift from a caterer. The lift had been used in getting food on and off of a truck, but it was of a type designed to take wheelchairs off of busses. The unit has a sturdy base which bolts to the truck floor or in our case, the concrete floor of the garage. There is a hydraulic pump which moved two very sturdy arms. The whole thing is powered off the truck’s battery.

It was clear that while a significant current was needed, a large battery was not. We found a battery assist device, something to start your car when the battery is dead. It has a battery – can deliver a large current and has a built in charger allowing us to simply leave it plugged into the wall.

When we tried the device, the motor running the pump made a lot of noise. We took it in and they said that the brushes were bad and made a fix which helped but would not last. Then as my brother in law was installing it, the top popped off as the motor was inverted for insertion and the brushes fell out. It makes noise but works and we will see how long it lasts. The local dealer knows how to get replacements.

Operation is dead simple – roll onto the lift and push the up button. When it gets to the top it stops. Down simply opens a solenoid which releases the hydraulic fluid allowing a silent descent. Able bodied folks can simple use walk up the lift and take a single step to get in the garage.

Now I can drive into the garage and get in and out of the car without sitting out in the rain.

The Cup Holder

The Gimp and his Gizmos – A

Carrying anything in a wheelchair is a huge amount of trouble. There are no good surfaces for resting packages. Laps tend not to be flat and any sudden stop can cause a package to slip disastrously to the floor. Furthermore the legs are not particularly designed to carry anything of unusual shape or weight.

The problem for carrying fluids is even worse because they can spell and in most positions for a fluid might be carried that spell is directly into your lap. Remember, that while you can sit in a wheelchair and hold the glass that action consumes one of your hands and it requires both hands to move the chair. While I was in the hospital they suggested that the best way to carry a cup was to wedge it between your legs. This worked relatively well for cold drinks and cases where the cop is not to full. It is obviously too dangerous to carry hot fluids between your legs.

When I got home I bought a thermos container with a lid that sealed well and had a hole that can be opened with a button. This allowed me carry hot coffee and tea in my lap without great fear of burning myself. It was not, however, the solution I really wanted.

Eventually I decided to look for a cup holder that could attach to the frame of my wheelchair. I wanted something that could fold up into a small package that would not be in the way when nothing was being carried. Eventually I found a holder at Mobility Aids that met most of my criteria. It is shown below on my new wheelchair holding a cup of coffee. The upper holders are adjustable and can accommodate many different sizes of cup. I do find that it does not do well with cups that are not tall enough and can slipped below the upper holder.

 

 

The holdercomes with a great bracket for attaching it to the frame of a Quikie chair. When I got my TiLite the bars on the frame were too large attachment that came with the cup holder. My solution was to go to the electrical departmentof the local hardware store and buy a series of pieces that were designed for holding electrical conduits. Two of these fit into the holes in the existing device while a therapy wired able to be drilled.Initially I tried using only two attachment points both on the same side but the arrangement proved to asymmetrical and the cup tended to lean as it was being carried. The current arrangement shown below works well enough although even then the cup has a tendency to lean.

Of course,One of the things that I discovered is that while I greatly prefer Glasses made of glass and potteryThese have a habit of falling on the floor and breaking .We are in the process of getting a good supply of plastic cups and glasses  capable of surviving the abuses dished out to them.