Rodger is a veteran when it comes to his spinal cord injury. He was injured more than 20 years ago, so he has seen many changes in assistive technology and in the availability of funding to buy it. He feels lucky that he is a former employee of a major automaker, which means he has good benefits and the ongoing support of his union. In fact, the union paid for his power wheelchair back in the early eighties, before the current government funding program even existed. But even with the support of his benefit plan, union and other community organizations, finding the funding for his home renovations and ongoing technology needs is a steady job.
Rodger takes a practical approach to making his technology help him to do the things he wants to do. He describes himself as “very innovative,” using simple homemade devices as well as three different chairs for different purposes. He has many friends who are happy to help him find, adapt and fix his technology. He counts a number of lucky finds in his stock of assistive technology, and he keeps them working for years. As a result, Rodger maintains an active social life and enjoys his woodworking shop. He goes to a lot of woodworking shows and sometimes gives seminars. He used to sail in a 36-foot sailboat that he built himself, and he still keeps a powerboat that he adapted.
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Rodger uses three different wheelchairs: a power chair, a lightweight manual, which he calls his “hand bomber,” and a manual stand-up chair. Each has its own use.
When Rodger was first injured, he lived in a house on a cliff overlooking the main beach of his town. Needless to say, going down the hill into town was easy, but getting back up was another story. The road “at one point was about a forty-five degree angle.” So to get home, he says he had to “sit at the bottom of the hill and wait for my son to get off the school bus and push me back up.” Then the union bought him his first power chair, and that changed everything. He remembers, “I could take off anytime I wanted. I could tour the village. Every weekend.” He said it was like being a tourist in his own town. That first chair lasted about five years.
By the time he needed a new power chair, the government had a funding program for assistive devices. Because of the hills where he lived, Rodger was able to convince the government to help him pay for a power chair, even though he has paraplegia and isn’t automatically eligible for one. His benefit plan picked up the amount that the government didn’t cover. These extended health benefits have been very important to Rodger. They cover his wheelchair repairs, and a number of other items such as prescription medicines.
Rodger has since sold his home on the cliff. Now he lives with his daughter and son-in-law in “tobacco country.” The terrain is still hilly, and now it is sandy as well, so he still needs a power chair. Because of his ability to repair the chair, his second one lasted him 15 years. But the company that made that power chair went out of business, so it was hard to get parts for repairs. Once again, Rodger was able to convince the government funding program of his need for a power chair. He is very happy with the new one he has. Rodger says, “It’s got the huge, great big, fat, I call them ATV, tires on it. It’s such a powerful, beautiful chair.” It allows him to go all over the property and down to the pond where he and his family like to sit in the summer.
Those “huge, great big, fat” tires pose some problems too. Rodger explains, “I have about a ten thousandth of an inch clearance to get through my door out into my workshop and into my van. If it was half an inch bigger I wouldn’t be able to get onto my lift in the van. It’s because the tires are so big and fat. And the, the chair itself is so wide.” Rodger explains that he just didn’t think about whether it would fit when he bought it, but through “sheer luck” it does.
The way Rodger got the chair was through a guy in the wheelchair repair business who he met at one of his woodworking shows. Through this contact, he picked up a good deal on some wood for woodworking and got in touch with a nearby wheelchair vendor. The vendor visited him at his home with a catalogue. Then he brought a loaner for Rodger to try out for two weeks. Rodger recalls, “He got in it first to make sure everything was working okay. And it’s very hilly around here. Well, he took that thing in places that I’d be afraid to take an all-terrain vehicle in and just motored right through everything. So that’s what sold me.”
Rodger’s power chair is great for getting around the property. The power chair comes in handy in town too, because most of the sidewalks have a slope from the storefronts down to the curb. That makes pushing a manual chair very difficult. “It was a nightmare trying to push along those. If I go anyplace I’m not sure of, I always take my electric.” Rodger’s shoulders are grateful for the power chair too. He notes, “My body’s getting tired, and my shoulders and arms are starting to see the wear. It’s just normal wear and tear from lifting myself in and out of bed and around. And every 15 minutes I’m supposed to lift to get the pressure off my behind.”
Rodger does have a lightweight manual wheelchair, also purchased by the union 15 years ago, for everyday use. It’s fine for trips to places with level floors like the mall. Because he is a tall man, six-foot-one with “gorilla arms,” he found he had to modify the wheels and push rims on his manual chair. He replaced the standard wheels with smaller ones so that he could transfer without a transfer board and without the risk of hitting the wheel as he went over them. Or as he puts it, the small wheels are “one more aspect of saving my behind, I guess you’d call it.” He also finds that the smaller wheels and the smaller push rims are more comfortable for him to push. He explains, “With the regular [push rims], I feel like I’m up pushing underneath my armpits. But with the smaller ones, my arms are down a lot farther, and I can push much easier.”
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Rodger’s favourite chair is the stand-up chair, which is also 15 years old. He says that’s the one he uses “95% of the time.” He got the stand-up chair because he had a friend who encouraged him to take up woodworking. He remembers that he was “very reluctant” to use the large lathe from a sitting position because “you’ve got a twelve-inch piece of wood turning on the lathe at say, six or seven hundred RPM, and if it flies off the lathe or anything, your face is six inches from it, you know. So I was very, very reluctant.” With a stand-up chair, Rodger’s head is farther away from the lathe when he is working.
One drawback to the stand-up chair is that “you’ve got to stay right where you’re standing up. You can’t move around with it. But I don’t really find that a drawback, you know, because if you want anything on the top shelf or anything like that, you just go there and stand up, get it off the top shelf and go down. Even on the wood lathe, my big wood lathe out there, say I’ve got to change positions. I can shut the lathe off, and I can swing everything, my bowl and my lathe rest and everything, around to where I want it, and then lock it back in place, start my lathe back up and start working.”
A bigger drawback to the stand-up chair is that Rodger can’t use it outside because it has doesn’t have enough ground clearance. The footrests are built very low to the ground so that they actually touch the ground and provide support when he stands up. Rodger explains that outside, “It’s like trying to push a tank because there’s such low ground clearance. You come to a half-inch pebble, you ground out. It’s just not an outside chair.” Even when he uses the stand-up chair around the house, he can’t get over the various thresholds because of the footrests.
Rodger didn’t have any government funding to help purchase the stand-up chair. He paid for a third himself, a community SCI agency paid a third, and a local service club paid a third. Rodger says of his chair “I’ve been happy with this one as long as I’ve had it,” though he would like to upgrade to an electric stand-up chair if he could afford it. All the same, his manual stand-up chair has allowed Rodger to continue with his woodworking.
The other important feature on Rodger’s power wheelchair is an air-filled cushion. He recently switched from the foam cushion he had before because he has had a lot trouble with pressure sores. He notes, “This year I was in [hospital] for five months with pressure sores on my behind, so I’ve really, really got to be careful. There isn’t too much meat left on my behind to do much more patching.”
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Rodger’s problem with pressure sores also has him looking for a new bed. He explains, “I’ve got an air bed, but in the hospital, because of my pressure sores, they recommended I get one with all different bladders in it. And as air goes out of one bladder, it fills up the next one, so that your weight is constantly shifting on your body.” He was able to try three different mattresses while he was in the hospital, for a week at a time, so that he could get a good idea of what will work for him. He found that two of them were hard to move around on, but he could change position by himself on the one he chose.
As usual, the challenge for Rodger is to find the funding for his new bed, because it costs over three thousand dollars. There is no government funding available for items like special beds, even though pressure sores can lead to many months of hospitalization. So Rodger will do what he always does: pull the pieces together from different sources of funding. His extended health benefits will contribute about a third and Rodger has approached his union to get some help with the rest of the cost, so that he can avoid more problems with his skin. Rodger is optimistic. “I’m 99.9% sure that [the union] will okay it, because they’ve been so super and so great with me.”
One of Rodger’s innovations is his homemade door opener. He says, “I open the door and give it a little tug and then I have a string that goes down, just barely touches the floor because I back up, I grab that string and pull the door open. And after I’m through it, I have a string on the other side that’s fastened to the door jamb on the one side into the doorknob on the other. So when I’m through I can grab the string and pull it shut behind me so the door shuts.” Rodger’s abilities in the wood shop also helped him overcome the sill at his front door. He built himself two small ramps to get himself “over that inch-and-a-half hump.”
He also relies on his “trusty little reacher” that he says is “better than legs a lot of the time…. It’s phenomenal what you can do with this little reacher, so I never go any place without it…. It’s even got a little magnet in it, so if you drop a coin or anything on the floor [you can pick it up].” He’s had the same reacher for over ten years. He recalls, “A nurse gave it to me. A little worse for wear, but it’s still going strong.”
Rodger gets a lot of satisfaction from woodworking. When he left his home on the cliff and moved in with his daughter, he “had this little twenty-four by twenty-four foot apartment and twenty-four by twenty-four foot woodworking shop all built” for himself. The shop is attached to his house and has two lathes, several large sanding machines, a radial arm saw and various other shop tools. The way Rodger set up his shop had more to do with controlling the “phenomenal” amount of sawdust he creates than with anything to do with his disability. Rodger says, “I think if I was walking, I probably wouldn’t do it any different than what it is right now.”
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In fact, the only problem Rodger had when he was setting up his shop was an 18-inch drop from the house to the shop. He knew that a new lift would cost thousands and a ramp would take up too much valuable floor space in the shop. Through his network of friends, Rodger was able to find a solution that did not cost a small fortune. He explains, “Well, a friend of mine in [a nearby town] I’ve known for oh, thirty, forty, fifty years I guess, friends down the street from him, they had a son that was in a wheelchair that passed away five years [ago]. And they had this lift sitting out front and so [Rodger’s friend] went down and asked them if they’d be interested in selling…. So I went down and had a look at it, and it was in pretty rough shape. It was sitting outside and so it was all rusty.” The owners sold the lift for a small amount of money and Rodger’s family picked it up. Another of Rodger’s friends is a welder and they refurbished it completely, while Rodger had the motor fixed. Rodger is very happy with the way this project turned out. “I can almost go up and change the light bulbs in the ceiling with it, it’ll go up so high. But I only need it to go up about 18 inches, and it works super for me.”
Rodger takes advantage of being close to a lake to go boating. He had a 32-foot sailboat that he built himself, but he remembers, “I had an awful time getting on and off of it.” So Rodger rigged a block and tackle to the boom, which allowed him to hoist himself up and swing over into the cockpit. He eventually gave up sailing because he felt so confined on the boat and found that he couldn’t steer it in “heavy weather.” So he sold the boat and invested the money into his workshop.
Rodger still enjoys boating, and he has since bought a 21-foot powerboat. Again, he had to come up with a way to get on and off it. He explains, “I rent one of the covered slips. So we put a barn door track in one of the ceiling joists. And after I built my sailboat, I had one of the rope block and tackles left over. So they had to make the dock going into the boathouse a little wider for me to get my wheelchair in. I wheel in, I wheel right underneath this barn door track with my rope block and tackle. I put a seatbelt around the front of my chair and around the back and hook it to this rope block and tackle, lift myself up, and slide myself down the barn door track…. I lower myself right down in the driving position, chair and all, and I’ve got a seat belt that goes around the front of my chair and locks me right in place, … so I can steer the boat and drive the boat wherever I want.”
The story of how Rodger got and adapted his vans sounds familiar: he bought second-hand and had the help of his friends and his union. Rodger had his first van for nearly 17 years. For the lift, a friend of his spotted a second-hand one for five hundred dollars in a shop that sells assistive devices. When Rodger heard that, he called them right away, “because at the time … [lifts] were around four thousand dollars.” His union paid for the lift and installation.
Rodger says his new van is “almost an antique,” but notes that mechanically, “the thing’s really great.” He bought it second-hand for twenty-two hundred dollars. When he went to have it adapted, he recalls, “I called two places. One place wanted seventeen hundred dollars. The other spot wanted eighteen, nineteen hundred dollars to put my lift in and my chair and my hand controls.” That seemed “an awful lot” to Rodger, especially since he has talented friends. He called up a long-time friend and persuaded him to do the job. Even though this friend had never done this kind of work before, it took him only about 21 hours to get the job done. He charged Rodger five hundred dollars. Rodger had to ask himself, if the job took his inexperienced friend 21 hours to do, how long would it take someone who did this kind of work all the time? Then he did the math. “So they were going to charge me a hundred, a hundred and fifty dollars an hour to do it. I don’t see how they can even begin to justify it.”
Rodger has learned a thing or two over the years. For example, he considers a power wheelchair “almost a must for everybody really, one way or another.” Certainly, “out in the country, it’s a must because of your ground, your hills and everything like that. Even in the city, all your sidewalks angle down from the buildings down to the road, and they’re very, very difficult—arm-breaking—to negotiate.”
One thing Rodger does regret is how much it cost to renovate his daughter’s home. The contractor he used “grossly” underestimated the costs. Even though lots of friends and family “did a phenomenal amount” to help out with the work, he had to take out a home renovation loan, and his daughter and son-in-law had to re-mortgage their house. So Rodger ended up with “no extra money” and some debt at the end of the process. He says, “I wouldn’t have done it at all if I’d known it had cost that much.”
Along the same line, Rodger thinks assistive equipment is overpriced. He says, “You can go out and buy a 21-speed bike for two hundred dollars, which is a lot more complicated in my mind than a wheelchair, and a [manual] wheelchair is two or three thousand dollars…. Because you’re disabled they figure they got you.” But they don’t have Rodger. He says, “If I can’t think of how to make it or how to do it, then I’ll go to the catalogue, but I try and think it up and make it myself first.” With this attitude, and the help of his family, friends and community, Rodger has saved a lot of money over the years, and he is still able to say that he is happy with his equipment.
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