Oh its my fault of course and I hold my hand up and take full responsibility BUT........ when you main mode of getting from A to B is wheels, when the wheels fail you are well and truly stuffed!!!!
Id spent last night doing some routine wheelchair maintenance, nothing major, some tightening of bolts, some slight tweaking, redoing the upholstery and straps, you know the sort of thing, and oh yes, I altered the foot plate. Actually I don't have a plate, not those large ones you see on chairs used by older people, what I have is a bar, because it reduces weight and I'm a minimalist sort of woman anyway. My own preference is to have it quite high, so my knees are high, this means I get more resistance when I lean forward and its a bit better for balancing the baby. Anyway I decided to raise it by about a centimetre or so. No problem, done and dusted....... or so I thought!
Today we took our son to Rheged where I was meeting a friend for lunch and he could play. My husband wandered off inside while I got out the car, heaved myself in my chair and Sh** the foot bar fell off!!!! I spent 10 minutes trying to hammer the damn thing back on with absolutely no success whatsoever and then to add insult to injury my cushion fell off into the road and a nice motorist had to stop and rescue it for me. By now I'm shouting Bollocks bollocks bollocks quite loudly to no one in particular. Hmmm I though perhaps if I take my shoes off......? I usually wear quite heavy shoes as I find they tend to keep my ankles straight. So at this point I have 3/4 of a working chair, Im sitting in the car in the pouring rain, no shoes on and I'm expected for lunch. Wonderful. Its times like this that I really feel like saying F*** this disability stuff Id like my real body back please! In the end I had to swallow my pride and make my way in with no shoes on and dangling feet. To say I felt utterly ridiculous is an understatement and if I didn't feel cripply before I certainly did then.
But like I said, it was my fault entirely!
I can appreciate the story, except I would be happy to say "bollocks" instead of what I usually say. I am not sure if your story of doing wheelchair maintainance is one I admire or dread - it seems that whether one is mechanical or not, once wheelchair appears, you must learn some sort of fine tuning that I used to pay others to do for my bicycle. As for feet, my new chair has 26 inch tires which is too large to get under any tables, so I have to pull the feet off the footplate and then roll around with the chair pushing them forward like some vacuum cleaner extention. Is there a way for legs to look sexy ala Wheelchair, if so, please let me know.
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