Tips from a Wheelchair Newbie - Breaking the Bounds

byIanCampbell

324 followers

10 years ago

WHEEL NEWBIE – BREAKING THE BOUNDS

In my last post, I established that as a newly disabled person it was my ambition to spend some quality time with friends ‘up north’ near Liverpool. The journey was a little fraught and eventually took 13 hours from door to door and each one of them was a limited form or torture.

For a person who has recently lost a leg, life becomes a choice mainly of sitting down or reposing on a couch or bed. If you really are determined, there might be some walking… I’m still working on that! So my sojourn was not only an opportunity to be with friends over the New Year but also a time when I could try-out my newly honed skills. I had planned that this would basically be to try to live as normal a life as I could; sitting on ordinary chairs instead of sitting in the wheelchair; going upstairs to bed by walking and climbing the stairs with my prosthetic; bathroom ablutions; making myself tea or coffee when needed, etc.,

Well, as they say in times of war, the ‘battle plan’ is thrown out of the window in the first hour of engagement. My friend lives in a lovely house with a drive up to it from the road. The problem is that it is on a slope and that the slope is probably of six seven degrees or so. One look at it and I knew that not only that I wouldn’t be able to navigate it in the wheelchair but neither would a normal size carer be able to push me in the wheelchair up the slope. Luckily my friend’s son, David was able to park near the top of the slope and I was able to hobble with a walking stick to the front door but it was a little un-nerving!

Inside the house, we proved that the width of every door in the house was incapable of permitting entry by wheelchair, BUILDERS PLEASE NOTE – WE ALL GET OLD AND WHEN WE DO, WE STILL NEED TO LIVE SOMEWHERE. WHY NOT START BUILDING WIDER DOORWAYS ON NEW-BUILDS?

By the second day I was suffering from what my American cousins refer to as ‘ass-itis’ from too much sitting in an upright chair… fine for an hour or two, but after sixteen hours? The solution to this was to sit in my wheelchair with its cushion which is a lot more comfortable.

Today, determined that not only would I get up, washed and dressed before everyone else but that I would also make and serve myself a coffee and take it through to the lounge-diner where I am writing this. The problem is one of confidence. If you walk with a stick it is nice to have the other hand free to latch onto hand rails, bannisters and flat surfaces to steady your gait. This means that to carry a mug of coffee you have to forgo this aid. You then appreciate what things need to be grouped together or within easy reach in the kitchen because what is a couple of steps for a walking person is several shuffles, clinging on to counter tops and other appendages for someone like me. Never mind. I did it which means that today I have achieved something and discovered more about my ‘limitations’! Tomorrow, I will tell you how I got on with booking my seat for the return home in a wheelchair on board a National Express coach. It’ll be fun! Trust me!!!

Ian Campbell

3rd January 2016