The Floor

Since my accident I have only been on the floor four times and each of those involved a spill caused by a bad transfer. In other words, every time I have been on the floor it was an unindented accident and my only real wish was to get back into my chair as quickly as possible.

For a long time I have thought that it might be nice to be able to get onto the floor and back into the chair - especially when there is work that is best accomplished from the floor.

The first problem in this is getting around once you are on the floor. It did not take me long to decide that a mechanics creeper was the best solution to this problem. After that there was the issue of how to get to the floor and to return the chair. In my exercise class one of the things that I did was to lift weights with a grip similar to that used in a pull up. I had no problem lifting 40 pounds but when I attempted to lift fifty I found that I was pulled up out of my chair because my body weight less than the weight that I was trying to lift. This suggested to me that I could use the same maneuver, a pull up, to get up out of the chair and to return to the chair from the floor . I would, of course, require some help positioning the chair after I did the pull up.

because we already had a Hoyer lift, it was an easy matter to fashion a pull up bar from a piece of pipe, some insulating foam for padding, and a couple of carbiners. The picture shows me on the mechanics creeper immediately after I have done a pull up to get off of my chair and then lowered myself onto the creeper. While I was doing this, my wife remove the chair and pushed the creeper in its place.

Having done this once I came to the conclusion that the Hoyer lift was a bad plan for getting out of the chair. Even though the wheels on the Hoyer will lock, the device tends to slip when you do a pull up. My conclusion is that the next generation will involve a bar are in a doorway which will be unable to slip. The other conclusion is that we did not have to change the height of the bar at any point during the process of getting onto the floor or back into the chair. This suggests that a single fixed bar, or rather a single fixed set of holders for a bar which can be removed, is all that is needed to facilitate smoothly getting onto and off of the floor. While the mechanics creeper is not as nice as the wheelchair for getting around, it is unlikely that most jobs will involve more than moving to the job, performing the work and moving back to the chair.