Although Charlotte was recently injured, she has already set herself up in an accessible condominium. In fact, she was able to oversee the renovations, with all the fun and hassle that involves. She is continuing her university education and supports herself with a job as a sales associate with a large home improvement retailer. Charlotte enjoyed outdoor team sports before her injury, and she finds ways to stay active now. She plays wheelchair tennis competitively and is exploring wheelchair basketball. Charlotte currently lives alone in her accessible apartment, but she is getting married. Eventually, she and her husband want to build an accessible home in the country.
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Charlotte has been living in a condo for two years. She feels fortunate that she was able to influence how the modifications were made, especially since she “loves home renovation stuff.” Charlotte’s insurance coverage also allowed her to hire an occupational therapist to help with her renovations. Charlotte kept working with her for a long time, even after the renovations were done. She recalls that when she bought the condo, “It just had drywall. None of the flooring was in or anything. And so we worked together with a lot of the design elements. We tore down a lot of walls.” Through this process, Charlotte was able to pick and choose among modifications that best suited her circumstances. For example, her husband-to-be is very tall, so she chose not to lower all of the kitchen counters. In fact, they have three different counter heights in the kitchen. She also knew that she would want to move someday, so she kept the resale value of her condo in mind when she made her decisions. She explains, “If everything was, like, super-disabled you know, people would tend to not want to buy it as much … so I had to be careful.”
The process of redesigning the kitchen offers some good examples of how Charlotte and her OT worked together. To help Charlotte determine how to modify the kitchen, the OT asked Charlotte about her lifestyle—questions such as did she like to have people over for dinner and was she planning to get married. Then together they decided what would work best. “So I wasn’t the smarty pants behind it all. I mean I thought of a few things. There were a couple of things that she probably couldn’t think about because she’s, you know, a walker…. But most of the things she thought of herself. She’s really good.”
The kitchen is an open-concept design so that Charlotte can slide items like hot plates of food over the counter to be picked up in the dining room. She explains, “I’m a pretty social person, so I thought I would be [entertaining a lot], and I wouldn’t want to have to worry about, you know, bringing food all the way around to the dining room. It’s so difficult, especially hot stuff and big things. I don’t want to put them on my lap and burn myself or something.”
In the kitchen itself, they decided not to put in any of the bottom cupboards, so Charlotte can wheel under the counters to work. They also lowered the top cupboards by about six inches so that she can reach the bottom shelves easily. To make up for lost cupboard space, they installed a pantry where there was “just a blank wall before.” Charlotte can also wheel under the stove. She explains, “I have a stove on the counter that I can wheel right under, and my oven’s one of the ones that’s in the wall. So it’s easier to get at. It’s right at waist level, so I can grab stuff out pretty easily.” She also chose a fridge with a freezer drawer at the bottom “because it’s kind of hard to reach the top,” and she finds it has more room than a side-by-side model.
Looking back, Charlotte says, “I’d leave less open … space under the counter open. A couple of sets of cupboards in there would be good. So the little things like that you learn.”
Charlotte expanded the bathroom off her bedroom by taking out the walk-in closet and using that space. On the advice of her OT, Charlotte decided to use a regular tub and a bath bench rather than installing a wheel-in shower. She explains, “I probably could have gone with [a wheel-in shower], but I was talking to my occupational therapist and she said that for resale value” it probably wouldn’t be a good idea. “A lot of people … don’t need a wheel-in shower and would probably find it an eyesore.” Besides, Charlotte notes, “I like to take baths as well, so that’s kind of a good option to have.”
To make it safe for her to transfer into the tub, however, Charlotte had to have a grab bar installed, which turned out to be a big hassle. When she first moved in—in fact, on one of the first days she was living in her new condo—she had a serious accident in the bathroom. “I have ceramic tile in the bathroom, and the floor was all slippery, and I was a little tired. And I transferred, and I fell and I bashed my head, and I got a concussion. Like I was knocked out on the ground. It was really bad. And so my roommate … came in and had to call the ambulance to come and get me and everything. It was really terrible.”
After that incident, her OT insisted that she install a grab bar. Because the builders had not installed one when they were building, they “had to cut a hole in the wall, put the plywood in there [to secure the bar] and then re-drywall over top.” And the bill for the bathroom renovation was higher than it needed to be if they had installed it properly in the first place. Charlotte now has a flip-down grab bar. “I don’t use it all the time. Only if I’m really tired and you know, I need to get some extra help.” As to why she chose slippery ceramic tiles for her bathroom, Charlotte explains that she didn’t have a choice. As a “luxury condominium,” the building puts certain requirements on its residents, one of which is what floor coverings they can use.
Charlotte left rehab with two raised toilet seats that she never used. “I never took them out of the box…. I brought them home, spent like whatever they were, like a hundred bucks or whatever on each of them, I don’t even remember. They sat in the closet.” She had used a raised toilet seat in rehab, but when she was home she “wanted as few devices as possible, because you know, there’s not raised toilet seats at restaurants and stuff like that.” Based on this experience, Charlotte advises others to “try and learn to do things with the least amount of equipment.” She recalls, “I remember when I first started, I was hopeless. You know, I needed people to help me like get off if the toilet was too low. Even now obviously there’s still a struggle sometimes, but I feel pretty confident going anywhere and thinking, ‘Okay, yeah, I’m going to be able to use the washroom here,’ as long as I can fit through the door.”
The advice of Charlotte’s OT even extended to what floor she should live on. Originally, Charlotte had chosen a fourth-floor apartment, but her OT suggested that she would be safer in the case of fire if she were on the first floor. Charlotte finds it “kind of creepy” to be on the ground floor where she can see people “walking around out there.” But she adds, “That’s what blinds are for.” What is worse, Charlotte can’t get out of her apartment by herself in any case. She explains, “There’s still like a three-foot drop out to the ground. I mean obviously it’s better. Someone could reach over and get me rather than having to fall down from the top floor.”
Charlotte also had a serious access problem with the entrance to her balcony because it had a six-inch lip on it. She explains that the condo management is “very weird about anything on the outside of the buildings. They’re so finicky. You have to like have all the same colours. The drapes.” As a result, they didn’t want her to lower the door to her balcony, “because it would be six inches lower than the one next door, and if you’d walk by you’d notice.” The condo management said they were afraid it wouldn’t be “aesthetically pleasing.” Charlotte says, “I told them they might as well have put a wall there you know—six inches is huge.”
The builders tried to persuade Charlotte to use a ramp to get to her balcony. “So I would have a six foot ramp running through my living room for me to get on my balcony…. They thought they could build little steps and I could bump up little steps.”
Then the condo management even suggested that there could be structural problems if she lowered the door to her balcony. But Charlotte’s boyfriend is an engineer, and he pointed out to them that if “that little six-inch cement patio thing there is holding up this whole building, we’re selling this place because it’s going to fall in on our heads.”
In the end, Charlotte won the argument, but not without a cost. She explains that to fix the problem, the contractors “charged me like twenty-five thousand dollars or some disgusting amount of money. We had to take this whole wall out. And then take this whole door out and lower the whole thing and redo the whole patio. And it was just ridiculous. Thank God I had an insurance company to pay for it because I wouldn’t have been able to use the balcony at all.” Charlotte notes that, fortunately, “that was the only issue they were a little weird about, the balcony issue, but once that was done I was okay.” She also adds that no one has noticed that her doorway is slightly different.
To make life easier in the living room, Charlotte chose hardwood floors, rather than carpet, and light furniture on casters, so that she can move it easily to clean. In fact, Charlotte has hardwood floors throughout her condo. She says, “It’s easier to keep clean. Sweeping and stuff like that. It’s a lot better than having to vacuum, because vacuuming is so hard. It’s hard to manoeuvre with one hand and try to vacuum with the other. As to the furniture, she explains, “Everything’s pretty light. Like I can move all this stuff around by myself. The couches … this coffee table … the TV stand. So if I need to get at the wires and stuff, I can pull it out. Because it’s on the hardwood, you just like push it. It’s quite easy.”
One of the most valuable things Charlotte learned from her home modification experiences is how to deal with contractors. For one thing, the whole process took much longer than it was supposed to. There was a gap of several months between the time Charlotte was ready for discharge from her rehab hospital and when her new condo was ready. She explains that she was ready for discharge because “I was at that point where … I was doing, you know, everything by myself. And I sort of wanted to go too…. After seven months in [hospital], it’s like you get claustrophobic.” She thought she would have to wait only three months to move in, so “that was not a big deal. And then, they kept pushing the date back.” Three months became nine months of living in a hotel. She recalls, “It was pretty terrible. It was just … a bed in a room … with a TV—that was it. And then the bathroom was just like regular, supposedly wheelchair accessible.”
Another lesson that Charlotte learned was that the contractors “don’t really understand and it’s hard for them. And you have to tell them things three or four times before they realize, ‘Oh yeah, she can’t jump over a six-inch lip,’ or you know, ‘She does actually mean twenty-three inches off the ground or she can’t wheel under.’ In the bathroom, we ended up having to do things a couple of times because the ledge was too low, and I kept banging my legs. So there are just a few things that I know, if I was the person in charge, I think I would have done it a lot differently.”
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See Charlotte demonstrate the use of her standing frame. Choose a format: |
Charlotte wants to do all she can to stay healthy. Her physiotherapist recommended that she get a standing frame because when she had her accident, she developed a condition called heterotopic ossification. She describes it this way. “Because I broke a lot of bones at the bottom of my legs, my body kind of went into calcium overdrive, … so my knees felt like all bony, like the muscle went all bony. So they were afraid that my knees would really get stuck.” Charlotte is also aware of the other benefits of standing after a spinal cord injury, such as weight-bearing to prevent bone density loss and osteoporosis. She also notices that, “It helps with like digestion and stuff like that, I think. Like I get really bad stomach aches from sitting. You know, food doesn’t get processed properly when you’re sitting all the time.”
As well, Charlotte finds that it just feels good to stand. She says, “I think it’s good psychologically to be standing every once in a while—it makes you feel tall again. Because I’m five-nine. I’m not a short person, but I feel like one, all the time looking up at people. So it’s kind of fun to be standing tall again. My boyfriend had never seen me stand before, so that was kind of, you know, fun for him to see me. And I’m taller than him in this thing. Because it gets you off the ground so much, so that’s kind of funny.” Standing gives Charlotte more independence too. She used her standing frame to paint her bathroom. “That took me like hours and hours. But I did it myself, so it was kind of a, you know, a good thing.”
Charlotte chose the standing frame that she did for a couple of reasons. “We got this one because it wheels around. You can move yourself around when you’re standing.” Unfortunately, the wheeling feature isn’t “very practical. Like I wouldn’t want to wheel around all day in it. Like you’re steering with the back wheels, so I bump into stuff all the time, and it’s kind of a pain in that sense. But to use it just as an actual everyday standing frame, it’s good. It works well.” Charlotte also chose a standing frame that “I could get in and out myself…. You just pump yourself up. That was something I wanted for sure.” The vendor let Charlotte test-drive a few standing frames before she made her choice. She recalls, “I had a few brought in to try them out for a couple of weeks at a time before I bought one. My [current] vendor’s really good.”
There is one disadvantage to the standing frame. “It’s huge. It takes up so much room.”
Another way that Charlotte stays fit is by playing tennis. She didn’t play before her injury, but she sure does now. It started out as a hobby, but as she puts it, “I think I got hooked. I got the bug. I love it. My boyfriend, he’s never played before and I got him into it, so we both have memberships in the club down the street.”
Charlotte trains seriously and plays competitively. She says, “I’m ranked 9th in Canada right now, which is sort of exciting, in my division. So I play lots of tournaments and I train twice a week with my coach. I have a private coach.” In fact, her coach was the source of her second-hand tennis wheelchair. Charlotte says, “I didn’t want to buy a new one because they were like four thousand dollars. They’re really expensive.” Her coach’s spinal cord injury is “almost at the same level as me. He’s T4 and I’m T3. So the back of the chair was the right height [for trunk stability]. You want them to be like as narrow as possible. That way you’re more mobile.” Charlotte explains that she can’t use her everyday chair for tennis because she would “probably flip over backwards.” To prevent tipping, the tennis chair “has a bar with one little wheel on the front. And then it’s got a bar with one little wheel at the back, so that you don’t flip over backwards. And then the wheels on the side have lots of camber, … so you don’t tip over sideways, which is good as well. And lots of straps. I have a strap to hold myself in because I don’t have any working abdominal muscles, … [and] there’s a bunch of straps for my legs.”
Charlotte uses just a regular racket for her game. “You use your racket like you’d use your palm, like when you’re pushing normally. I usually put my thumb on my wheels, just for extra tension…. I used to like miss it all the time and drop it and stuff like that. But it got, it was like nothing and you know, it’s just natural then.” It took about a year of playing once a week before Charlotte felt really comfortable.
If anyone is interested in playing wheelchair tennis, Charlotte recommends a tennis camp that she attended. “We have the camp in the third week of June. It’s a two-day program for everyone.” Players are divided into groups according to their skill level and can attend clinics to develop various skills. “Each court has a different coach teaching a different skill. And then you just rotate, and you’re learning a little bit about each element to the game, and then by the end of the weekend, you know, you feel a lot more confident.” The rules for wheelchair tennis are the same as they are for regular tennis, “except we get two bounces before the hit.” There is also a wheelchair tennis link on the Tennis Canada website.
Just in case tennis doesn’t keep her busy enough, Charlotte is also starting to play basketball. “I just started playing basketball last week for the first time. And it was great and those guys are nuts. I always played high-intensity sports, so I think that will be good for me.”
Charlotte gets out to her various activities in her pick-up truck. She describes the importance of having a vehicle as “huge.” “When you don’t have a vehicle, it’s so hard to get anywhere. I mean you can wheel only so far before you get tired, your back is sore, stuff like that.” She uses hand controls and had the floor lowered “a little bit, because it was a bit too high for me to get in and out of efficiently, and get my chair in and out of.” And she notes that having the floor lowered in her truck was “a lot cheaper than having to do anything to a van.” Besides, she doesn’t feel “motherly” enough yet to drive a van. “I thought while I was still young and able to have good shoulders to lift up the chair I might as well go with something kind of funky. I guess that’s why I did it.”
To get into the truck, Charlotte “transfers up.” Then she pulls her chair in and takes the wheels off so that it will fit into the passenger seat. “There’s one of those little flip-down seats. I just put that away and then just stick the wheels in behind there. And then the actual chair sits on the seat.” She finds that if she is careful, she has enough room that she doesn’t get herself dirty when she pulls the wheels across in front of her. On the other hand, her attitude is, “You’re going to get dirty when you’re wheeling anyways, right?” But she finds it’s not much of a problem.
Charlotte used to have a sports car that was low to the ground. She finds that transferring from the truck back into her chair is easier than it was from the sports car. She says, “It’s easier to get down than it is to get up, so that’s better.”
Like many, Charlotte found that her first chair was too heavy. She says it felt like it “weighed like four hundred and fifty pounds. So it wasn’t all that practical to get it in and out of the car all of the time. And I used to have to take the back off. I’d have to take off the cushion and fold it up too, you know, and it just took so long to put it out in the car.” She had to replace it a year and a half after getting it, which, fortunately was eventually approved by her insurance company.
Charlotte now uses a lightweight titanium chair, but it is not without its own problems. Charlotte was concerned with keeping the chair as light as possible, so she went “pretty bare bones. I never had handles put on because I didn’t ever want people to push me. Now, like my boyfriend wishes I had handles because we go to car shows and stuff a lot. He needs to push me through grass. So I think we’re going to get some of those clamp-on handles.”
Charlotte also needed a different back on her second chair because she developed a curve in her spine. The cushion she uses now “is flat and then it goes up so that it lifts my one side of my body up more to straighten me. It’s a foam cushion, and then we just put in an extra piece of foam. My physio and I decided to do this. And then we just shaved it in there, so that it lifted my one hip up more. And then it helps to straighten me up a little bit.”
The biggest problem with her second chair though, is that the seat is not the right length for her. The wheelchair vendor measured her for this chair, and she feels the vendor measured her “completely wrong.” She explains, “I should be sitting a lot further in.” And that is after she made some homemade adjustments to the chair. This had some serious consequences for Charlotte. At first, “I was falling out almost on a daily basis, and like, almost broke my arm a couple of times.”
One thing that Charlotte did to prevent herself from falling out of her chair was to flip the footplate around. She explains, “The footplate actually is on backwards. It used to be underneath, so my legs were like really on an angle going in. And every time I’d hit a bump, I’d like fly out forward. So we flipped it around. So it helped a little bit. It’s made me a little more stable.” She also increased the dump in the seat to make her “a little bit further down.”
If she had to do it again, Charlotte says, “I’d get an OT to measure me, … because, I mean, as much as they think they know, these vendors are not trained and they don’t have a university degree … or anything.” She was surprised that using an OT would be necessary considering that “I’d already, you know, bought a chair and I already knew what I was looking for. And [the OT] had told me the … one that I should get, which was this one. And so I thought, ‘Okay, she’s done her part, and now all I need to do is get measured.’ I thought it was simple. I didn’t think that it was anything that could get screwed up or anything. But apparently I was wrong.” Charlotte says she is now used to her chair, but “I haven’t been a hundred percent happy with either chair. But I’m learning slowly, and hopefully with the next one I’ll be able to make the proper decisions.”
Charlotte’s job with a home improvement retailer satisfies more than her need to make money while she finishes university. She likes home renovations and she likes to be active. She uses cardboard boxes on her lap to carry things around the store and her chair to push larger items. “I do a lot of lifting and you know, carrying stuff around the store. I actually do a lot of the things that everybody else does. Obviously there’s a limit. Like I’m not out there slugging bricks and stuff like that, and I can’t get the stuff off the very top shelf. But everyone’s very accommodating and they help me a lot.”
Not everyone was accommodating at first. When Charlotte went to hand in her application for the job, the girls behind the desk laughed at the thought of her working in the store. She remembers, “I was so insulted when I left. I was almost crying. I was so sad.” Sad, but undaunted. She pursued the job and she got it. Furthermore, she notes, “Now I have a better job than they do, and I’m making more money than they do. Everybody in the store always wants to work in the departments, as associates, and most of the time, you start out as a cashier. And I got to start out right away as an associate, because I knew the fundamentals. So I think that that was kind of funny, ironic, that I’m above them all now.”
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Hear Charlotte's advice for those who are newly injured. Choose a format: |
Charlotte has practical advice for others dealing with spinal cord injuries and assistive technology. First, she recommends, “go with the minimal amount of equipment that you need to do everything that you want to do.” She recalls her experience with the raised toilet seat as an example. She can transfer from any toilet seat now, so that piece of equipment was simply “not necessary, and it was an expense that I really didn’t need to make at that point.” At the same time, “Get rid of your ego.” Use technology “to make your life a bit easier, because you’re probably going to just stress yourself out [or] try to restrict yourself too much.”
Second, Charlotte recommends that people with spinal cord injuries should not compare themselves with other people with the same level of injury, “because, like not every T3 can do everything I can. And I can’t do everything that every T3 can.” Each spinal cord injury is unique.
Charlotte extends this advice to those working professionally in rehab too. She says, “I think that it’s really important not to categorize us by our injury level. ‘Oh, you’re T3, so therefore you’ll be able to do this, this, and this six months from now.’ That’s ridiculous because there’s things I can do that the doctors were like, ‘she’ll never be able to do that,’ you know.” Rather, professionals should consider “where we want to be. If the physios and OTs had listened to me and heard me say, ‘I want to go to school, and I want to be really active, and I want to be doing this, this, and this,’ they might have said, ‘Okay, maybe this chair isn’t perfect for you. Maybe we should get you something lighter that’s going to be easier to transport’ and things like that. So maybe listening to the patient more than just looking at them clinically is important.”
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