In the few years since his injury, Shawn has focused a great deal on mobility. His insurance company has co-operated in this effort, approving the purchase of a high-end, lightweight wheelchair as well as a pick-up truck with all of the needed accessibility modifications. Shawn has found this type of equipment important to resuming his active outdoor lifestyle, which includes fishing and camping. Weather has also been an important consideration in Shawn’s purchase decisions. He lives in an area with four pronounced seasons, so snow and rain are facts of life that cannot be ignored when choosing equipment. At this point, Shawn has his basic mobility needs taken care of and is concentrating on some longer-term goals: building an accessible house, setting up a woodworking shop and going back to school.
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Shawn is still using his first wheelchair, which is extremely lightweight because of its titanium parts. He took his time with the selection process, which included a trial period of several months with a similar model. Shawn feels that he made a good choice and is happy with the overall quality and feel of the chair. His purchase included an additional set of lightweight wheels, which he finds best suited to the city when there’s no snow on the ground. The combination of these wheels with an already light chair results in a total weight in the neighbourhood of 20 pounds. This weight translates into a satisfying degree of manoeuvrability and relatively easy pushing for Shawn. He says, “It’s good on the cement—like I can push it twice and you know, take a break and I’m coasting.”
Justifying the purchase of this chair and wheels was not difficult for Shawn, even though they cost significantly more than the average manual wheelchair. The government where he lives pays a percentage of the wheelchair purchase price up to a maximum amount. In Shawn’s case, this maximum came to just over a quarter of the total price of the chair. He was able to convince his insurance company to pay the remainder, as well as the cost of the extra wheels. Shawn thinks his age and activity level worked in his favour in these negotiations, with the insurance company acknowledging that he needed a chair that would suit his lifestyle.
Shawn chose the particular features of the chair to support his desire for mobility. He switched from his high back to a low back because he found the high back was getting in the way of his pushing motion. That’s also why he sometimes doesn’t use his armrests, although he likes having them on when he is just sitting around. He has several bags in strategic locations on the chair: one in back, one under the front and a pouch on the side. Each bag carries different items that Shawn wants to have with him at all times. He also finds the plastic clothing guards that came with the chair useful for keeping the rain and snow off his clothes.
Despite the advantages, Shawn is not satisfied with everything on the chair. He finds the brakes loosen over time and rub against the tire when he is pushing, which slows him down. As a result, Shawn is always having to check that his brakes are not in contact with the tires. Also, Shawn would not get the plastic coating on the push rims of his wheels again. When the plastic gets wet in the rain, it gets very slippery and Shawn has a harder time controlling his chair. He also finds that the plastic tears easily, resulting in sharp edges that make pushing difficult. He explains, “They feel like little cuts on them when you’re pushing them. Especially if you’re going down a hill and you’ve got to hold onto it. You just hold onto it, and you feel it going through your hands. Like it’s almost like it’s slicing your hand against the tires.” And the rims can’t be re-coated. “You have to buy new ones,” Shawn says.
At first, Shawn thought his transportation choice was simple: a van or a car. He knew he didn’t want a car because of the winter weather where he lives. After transferring into the driver’s seat, he would always need to pull his chair in over top of himself, along with any snow or slush that the chair had picked up along the way. As he investigated a little more, he found out that a truck was a real option. He could avoid the need to handle a wet, messy chair through the use of a lift that would automatically store the chair in the back of the truck after he had transferred into the driver’s seat. He eventually decided that a truck was the way to go.
Shawn’s insurance paid to have the truck modified, which was a good thing, considering that it cost nearly eighty thousand Canadian dollars. He explains that it cost “fifty for the truck and then twenty-five for upgrades.” In addition to hand controls, he has a powered driver’s seat that he can push back to make transfers easier. He also has a lift to store the chair and a motorized shell that covers the truck’s box to protect the chair from the weather while he is driving. Finally, he uses a remote starter to get the engine going before he transfers.
At one point, Shawn thought a truck might have been the wrong choice for him because it takes a while to transfer into the truck with his system—long enough to get quite wet if it’s raining. He found a simple solution though. He balances an umbrella between the open driver’s door and the roof of the truck, and now it doesn’t matter how long it takes to transfer. He has also learned that he needs a box heater to prevent the shell from icing shut. He wasn’t aware of the need for such a heater until one icy morning he found that the motor didn’t have enough power to open the shell because it was frozen around the lip. The heater goes “in the corner and when you start your truck in the morning, and it heats up the back too. So it sort of thaws everything out.” In a similar vein, Shawn is impressed with a special windshield de-icing fluid he has found, which eliminates the need to scrape.
Overall, Shawn is especially pleased with the truck. He likes the sense of freedom he gets from driving. “You can go out anywhere, do anything. You don’t have to wait for a bus or wait for somebody else to help you out and pick you up…. I just pack up my stuff and go.” Shawn also likes the looks of a pick-up truck: “You can’t tell I’m disabled if you look at me if I’m driving, other than if you see the spinner knob on the steering wheel.”
Shawn also has a power-assisted stand-up chair, primarily to maintain his bone density. He explains, “You push the button, and pzzz you’re standing. Push the button, boom you’re sitting.” Shawn also uses the stand-up chair to cook, and he is considering using it in the woodworking shop he hopes to build. It was suggested to him that he could use it to go shopping so that he would be able reach things on high shelves. But he finds the stand-up chair is just too hard to push around. In fact, he has never taken it out of his house. Just the same, he loves his stand-up chair because it just feels good to stand again. He says, “It’s nice just to be straight again. Put the pressure on your feet, eh?” He tries to use it several times a week, though he notes, “For the price of the darn chair [I] should be using it every day!”
Shawn has a tub lift that he describes as “ideal” because it allows him the option of either a shower or a bath. He recalls, “I didn’t think I was going to be able to take a bath because when I was at the hospital I was on a commode.” At home, he transfers onto his tub lift, pushes a button, and it lowers him into the tub. He can have a bath or leave the drain open and use a hand-held shower.
Shawn enjoys fishing from a local pier. He finds that he just needs a longer rod, “a ten-footer.” With the longer rod, he doesn’t have to sit close to the edge and risk being pulled in. He explains, “That’s all you need—you get a fish on and it pulls you in a bit or it pulls you forward a bit, and you’re going to go in the drink.” For safety, Shawn also wears an inflatable life jacket when he fishes. “It’s really skinny, pull a lever and an air canister pulls it up so it … feels like you’re just wearing a little vest or something like that.” He tried fishing from a boat, but getting in and out was a little difficult. He hopes to get a boat in the future and make it accessible.
For camping, Shawn uses an extra large tent and a “a plain-Jane king-size air mattress.” He uses a sturdy cooler to transfer on and off the mattress. The cooler is more or less level with his chair, so he finds it easier to transfer onto the cooler first and then move over to his chair or down onto the mattress. He had originally tried a camping cot because of its height, but he found it too difficult to use for dressing. Campground accessibility has been pretty good for Shawn in general. He was happy to find that one large wilderness park he enjoys visiting has a fully accessible washroom with a wheel-in shower. Shawn doesn’t yet have an all-terrain chair, but he is looking into getting one.
Shawn has lots of plans for the future. He hopes to return to school and eventually return to work. He is also working on plans for an accessible home. Shawn is a little frustrated with how long it is taking to negotiate funding for the house with his insurance company. Because of time pressures around discharge from rehab, Shawn had to “jump” on the place he is living in now, even though it’s not in a good location for him. “I didn’t have time to look around. They only give you like five weeks … a time limit on when you’re going to be let go from the hospital.” Shawn is working with his lawyer to resolve the outstanding issues with the insurance company. He would prefer to build rather than renovate, because “that way everything is done to what you want it, you need it for. Like the counters are already cut, instead of ripping the counters out and stuff like that.” Ideally, the house will have a double garage to accommodate a woodworking shop and an extra room or two for his weight-lifting equipment and his various pieces of assistive technology. He has looked at other people’s accessible homes to get an idea of what may work for him. The only problem now is funding.
Shawn has discovered the value of talking to peers and shopping around when purchasing equipment. He thinks he could have paid less for his truck modifications if he had known about a certain dealer that he later learned about from a friend who also has a spinal cord injury.
Shawn has also learned the importance of accepting his situation. Through trial and error, he has found ways to continue doing many of the things he enjoys, and he does his best not to get “stressed out” by the everyday frustrations of living in a chair.
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