François lives in the country with his family. He finds his equipment helps him “do things around the house,” which for him means working indoors and outdoors. He says, “When the weather is nice, it does not matter if it’s winter or summer, I’m outside, you know…. Like today … I was outside till about eleven thirty, twelve o’clock.” With the help of his technology, he is able to work in the garden and keep a few animals. Indoors, he is also able to put his many renovation skills to good use in modifying his country home. In the future, François hopes to modify a sailboat so that he can satisfy two of his passions—travelling and sailing.
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François chose his manual everyday chair by going through a catalogue from his wheelchair vendor. “I looked at every wheelchair…. The reason I chose that one was because it was the lightest wheelchair in the catalogue…. The frame … is around 18 pounds.” His research paid off. He says, “I’m very happy. I find it very comfortable and very, very easygoing you know…. I tried some wheelchairs when I was in the hospital—it’s like you’re dragging a building behind you.” François also had his wife in mind when he bought the lightest chair he could find, because she is the one who puts his chair into the car when they go out. She had trouble with the heavy hospital chairs that François used to come home in for weekends. But the chair he chose is light and easy for her to take apart. “The wheels come off and everything…. It helps her as well as it helps me.”
François’s rehab doctor recommended a stand-up wheelchair for him because he had plans for painting and putting up drywall when he got home. He says that he went to the vendor to find out about stand-up wheelchairs, but he wasn’t very impressed with what he saw. The wheelchairs they showed him didn’t allow him to move around in a standing position. So the vendor agreed to send a salesman out to his home with some other equipment. The salesman brought a wheelchair that allows the user to both stand and move around. “And like we say, I fell in love with it right away. When he lifted it up for me and showed me how to do it, I said, ‘That’s it. That’s what I need’ … because it lifts me right straight up, you know, from a seated position…. I can stand completely up in that chair … because I have the strap; it goes around my chest and holds me from falling forward…. Not even my spasms pull me out, you know. And I’m able to do a lot of things with that chair, actually.” François saved money on his stand-up wheelchair by buying a demonstration model.
The stand-up wheelchair runs on batteries that are good for “maybe two, three, four days…. If the battery is low, the lights start flashing … it tells me I have to recharge it. And I just recharge it, and that’s it.”
François is looking forward to when he has finished the work on the kitchen, because he’ll use his stand-up wheelchair to cook again. “I can move from one side to the other with it without coming down and sitting down again. See, because that chair will move even when I’m standing up … I have more heart to be able to cook, like I was able to cook before you know…” He notes, “I can even have my meal in the chair…. It has a tray.”
When the weather keeps François indoors, he likes to sit in his recliner chair that has a motorized lift. As François points out, “You can only sit so long in a wheelchair.” He can also recline in it, so he uses it to watch television and take naps. The recliner looks like a regular recliner chair, but he bought it through a wheelchair vendor. He finds that his regular living room furniture is so low that it’s hard for him to transfer back into his wheelchair. The recliner lifts him to a near-standing position, and he can get “as high as I want, so that I can get in my wheelchair. I can transfer much easier. I don’t need to use my transfer board or anything.”
François owned a construction company before his injury. Through his construction experience, he has developed definite opinions about the true costs of home modifications. And he has carefully chosen only the modifications that he feels are necessary. For this reason, he is renovating his basement for all his needs, to avoid the expense and hassle of installing an elevator in his home. He says, “An elevator isn’t worth ten thousand dollars to me. Not even five thousand dollars. I think it’s a rip-off.” This means he has no access to the upstairs of his house, but he reasons, “I don’t think I’d be any better off upstairs. You see upstairs, upstairs I would have to widen doors…. I would have to make changes anyway. And downstairs we have already … quite a nice bedroom. It has a nice window, and, as you can see, it’s not very dark in here.” He has plans for the bathroom as well. “Very soon I will have the bathroom here for me to access where I will be able to have my shower…. I can go in the toilet myself.”
With his background in construction, François finds it satisfying to do a lot of the work on his house himself. And with his stand-up wheelchair, he can. He points out that he “assembled all the kitchen cabinets. I was able to do the taping and the drywall in the bathroom…. I’m going to do all the ceramic tiles here. And when I’ll be doing the ceramic tiles, I’ll be able to do that by myself. I don’t need any help. The only thing I might need is somebody to pass me the tiles or something like that…. Mix the mortar and everything, because I have the machine as you know, just to mix everything. I can do that all myself.” In fact, François uses all of the tools that he used before his injury, even his table saws. The stand-up wheelchair allows him to get close enough to his table saws so that he could cut the wood for the trim and casings for some new windows. He then supervised his son in putting them in.
François also uses his stand-up chair outdoors. With a little help from his family, he transfers from his manual chair into the stand-up chair. He explains, “What I do is, before my wife leaves for work, I ask her, or in the evening I ask my kid, to place it in the garage for me. And I go with that, the manual one. I just transfer myself into it. And I’m able to do kind all of things.”
The stand-up chair allows François to do a bit of gardening. “With that chair, I’m able to get closer to the plants. And with a small hoe I’m able to weed as far as I can get the hoe….” Although he cannot tend to what he calls “the big garden,” he keeps a few chickens and lambs, tends his flower garden and enjoys his fishpond with the help of his stand-up chair.
François uses a tractor lawn mower to cut the grass on his property. He finds he can transfer from his wheelchair to the lawn mower, so he didn’t have to modify it in any way. However, the brakes must be operated with his feet, and he is not able to do that. So he just puts it into neutral when he wants to stop.
François has had less success with his scooter. He calls it a “dangerous necessity.” He got the idea for buying a scooter when he saw one of the patients in his rehab hospital with a scooter. She really loved hers for running errands and getting around. So when he got home, he went to the vendor to look at them. Then, he says, “They brought it here, and I tried it in the driveway and that’s it. But you know, I started to go all around with it…” and that’s when the problems started.
Neither he nor the vendor thought about the limitations of a scooter in the country. And he was already home from the hospital, so he had no professional advice from doctors or therapists when he bought it. What he found out is that a scooter is “better for the city … on level ground…. But they have [anti-tip] wheels behind [and] if I go into a soft spot of the ground, you know, those wheels are going to get me stuck.”
Even the vendor’s claims that François could use the scooter on the highway proved to be false. “Like when I bought it, they told me it was good for twenty miles and it’s not true.” François would like to be able to use the scooter to go the nearest city, but he’s convinced that “there is no way I would make it there.”
François has even had several spills involving his scooter. The scooter “tilts over very easily.” In one incident, François was stuck at the back of his property for three hours. “As I turned a little bit, the thing just tilted, and there I went…. And it was when winter was coming you know, in the fall. And I was worrying about it you know, because there were clouds…. Good job my son came straight from school and didn’t decide to go to his girlfriend’s or whatever.”
François thinks he may adapt his scooter himself, by taking off the anti-tip wheels. “Because you don’t do wheelies in a scooter. There’s no way you can do a wheelie. Because it’s too heavy in the first place for you to lift.” Ultimately, though, he is considering an all-terrain vehicle instead of a scooter. “I’ve been thinking about those all-terrain four wheel drivers…” for getting around his property.
François uses an exercise bike to keep his muscles in shape. He does not have movement in his legs, but he still uses a manual exercise bike. He explains, “I sit myself in the other [manual] chair, and I place my feet in there and I push my legs…. I use my hands.” He reasons that there is so much research into a cure for spinal cord injuries that he should be in shape, in case there is a cure. Besides, he argues, “If I want to go sailing, I have to be in … the best shape I can be.”
François has travelled extensively in his time. “I’ve been in almost every country…. I’ve been everywhere.” He has travelled to Europe since his injury, but not without some problems. The problems had nothing to do with his assistive technology and everything to do with some people’s attitudes and lack of consideration for people who have disabilities. When the flight attendant seated him in someone else’s seat because he would be more comfortable, the people originally assigned to that seat were annoyed and insisted that he move. That incident was very upsetting. He worries that his travelling days may be finished, so he is concentrating on sailing. “I’m trying to learn everything I can, and once I get the opportunity, I think I’ll be living the rest of my life on the ocean.” François sailed before his injury, and he has gone sailing on a local lake with an adapted sailing program run by a person with a disability. “And I enjoyed every minute of it.”
The sailing program uses a dingy, so there are no steps into the boat. To board, François transferred to a lift similar to a Hoyer lift. The lift put him into the boat and from there he was able to transfer into “one of those chairs, they come over from starboard to port you know.” The sailing chair is a seat in a tube that is a half “S” shape. It is tied to the floor of the boat and the user releases and moves the seat by pulling on a rope.
François says he is waiting for his certificate to arrive and his settlement from his accident to buy a forty-five to fifty-five foot sailing boat. He is hoping to pull together a crew of other people with disabilities who want to sail and a caregiver or two to sail around the world. He plans to place ads on the Internet to buy a second-hand boat and to recruit his crew.
François was an engineer in the navy, so he already has ideas about how to adapt a sailboat. He has seen a trolley system that he can attach himself to, so that he can “go from the stern to the bow of the boat … so we can change a sail or change the jib … from a standard jib to a storm jib, or something like that.” He figures it could cost as much as one hundred thousand dollars to make the adaptations, “because, you see, I have to get all the equipment, like GPS (global positioning system), radar, and all that kind of stuff I have to get into the boat…. We need the GPS you know, especially, people like us, need all that kind of technology to, to help us through because otherwise, you know, we’d be lost.” And although he hates computers, he recognizes that he will need one on board his sailboat “for many reasons—to send emails, to receive emails and weather reports and things like that.” Once he has the computer on board, “all the equipment can be automated to the computer. Like the GPS, the sonar. I know that for a fact, I have to learn…” He is less certain, but no less confident, about how to adapt a sailboat for boarding. “I think I have a pretty good idea what to do…. Unless the stairs can be removed, I have to figure out … like a sled, something like those trapezes we have over the bed, but with a rope … so we can pull ourselves … onto the deck….”
François looks forward to getting out on the ocean again. “I enjoyed the sea. It’s so peaceful and you see the killer whales. Sometimes, if you look, you see some dolphins. The sea can, I tell you one thing, you cannot beat this. To me there’s no place I can relax more or I’m happier than being on the ocean.”
François has learned how to make assistive technology work for him so that he can continue to do many of the things he really enjoys: gardening, keeping animals, living in the country. And he has plans for technology that will help him fulfill his dream of sailing around the world. Through his use of technology, François has maintained much of his self-reliance and his skills for renovating his home and improving his property.
Because he must pay for his technology out of his own pocket at the moment, François uses his experience to make thoughtful purchases. For example, he was willing to pay the high cost of the lightest chair he could find and for the stand-up that allows him to do so many things. But he knew from his experience that he would better off renovating his basement than buying an elevator. As he puts it, “I do more for less money than they were asking me for an elevator.” As a result, he feels that for the moment, he has everything he needs—everything except his sailboat, of course.
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