Some of these pieces were originally on the 'Red Squirrel Party" Blog, but I thought they might detract a little from the more political polemic there.

So I started this one.

The title, just in case the odd reader may not have fathomed it, is a deliberate mis-spelling. Because those of us who are disabled know very well how the non-disabled are all too prone to "diss" us about what we are (or or sometimes erroneously think we should be) able to do . . .

Tuesday 28 May 2013

Independent Living

Declaring independence isn't quite as easy as I thought. Well, declaring you intend to be is one thing; achieving it, relying as little on others as you can if you're using a wheelchair, turns out to be rather harder. But I'm not the only one to discover that.

A few weeks ago (I was on crutches that day, not on wheels) I tried to get some people on a rather crowded bus to shift out of the wheelchair space (or do I mean 'buggy space'?) so a young woman in a powered wheelchair could get in.

Blank incomprehension. The driver's efforts to get people to move didn't come to anything either. So she ended up parked sideways on, instead of safely against the backrest the way you're supposed to. I've had the same problem a few times, and you can't seem to get the idea across that if the bus stops suddenly, it's their feet you'll be taking off at the ankles. . .

However, we got talking, and she said when she got her wheelchair she thought it would make her more independent. She'd be able to get around more, without having to rely on her husband to push all the time. I said I'd put a motor on mine for the same reason.

"But," she said, "it didn't make me as independent as I thought it would. If I want to go much of a distance, I've still got to get my husband to come with me, so he can push when the battery runs out . . ."

I've hit the same problem. Well, not with a husband, obviously. According to the specs, the motor on mine should do ten miles. I don't know how, though: perhaps only if most of it is downhill? So far, it looks as though it probably won't last much more than half that.  I got that motor second-hand, and had to get a new battery for it; I ran out of power after less than three on the old one. And, of course, just at the point where the rest of the journey home was all uphill.

I'm luckier than my fellow bus traveller, though. She has rheumatoid arthritis which has affected her arms, and she can't wheel herself. She said, actually that some times she can't grip the joystick that controls the motor either, and has to nudge it around with her fists.

Thought for designers, here: every laptop has a trackpad. Why hasn't someone come up with something similar for wheelchair users that they don't have to grip?

Anyway, like her, for the moment, my happy thoughts of trundling along on my own all around London and getting to places I haven't been to for years because I'd have to walk too much either to get there or once I got there, and walking gets painful after a couple of hundred metres, are on hold.

At least until I work out how far that damn battery will take me. A friend suggested I simply rode around the block until the battery died to find out, but I already know what the surrounding scenery looks like, and that sounds a very boring exercise indeed. So I'm pottering about locally in different directions, with a cautious eye on the hilly bits and bus routes, so if the battery runs out on me, I'm not faced with the wheelchair equivalent of climbing Ben Nevis to get home.

I really hadn't understood until last year how strong you need to be to wheel even a lightweight wheelchair (even with an equally lightweight 'Squirrel' in it) even a kilometre.

It's tough. A lot tougher than I thought before I had to start doing it myself. Unless you have the sort of biceps marathon wheelchair racers have. And developing those weightlifting in a gym ain't within the range of possibilities for someone with a damaged spine like mine. It's just going to have to be practice. And aching arms. And I used to think I was reasonably strong for someone rather slightly built.

I could, I suppose, somehow store a spare battery under the wheelchair somehow, but with the motor and battery fitted, I have a wheelchair that already weighs twice as much as it does without. Those lead-acid batteries are heavy, man.

But Boeing gave me an idea. No, not the one about carrying a small portable fire extinguisher in my cabin baggage if I ever fly on a Dreamliner. Just about lithium batteries. They're generally smaller and lighter, I argued to myself. So, one would be ideal to stuff in the little bag on the back of my wheelchair to use as a kind of reserve fuel supply. After all in the days when I drove a car, not a wheelchair, I had a car that had a little reserve petrol tank tucked away under the boot.

Independence, however, as Ben Franklin, or Thomas Paine, or maybe George III, probably said, has its price. In this case, a 12V 17AH lithium battery (nice and small and light) with charger, a mere £150. And that was a special offer . . .Not sure how far it would take me, either. Apparently they're meant for electric golf trolleys. (I thought they were powered by human beings called caddies?) And they will last for 18-26  holes. I have never played golf;  nor had any interest in it. Except for taking a short cut across a golf course every now and then at night to get home quicker at one time.

(I gave that up after falling into some kind of pond in the dark. I'd always thought golf courses had holes in the ground full of sand, not bloody water.)

So I wonder how far 'eighteen holes' is? Haven't golfers heard about metres and kilometres? How long is one hole? I thought it was only a couple of centimetres. At least that's what I remember from being a kid on a putting green. I'll need to get a bit further than 52 centimetres on one battery. That wouldn't even get my wheelchair up a bus ramp.

Could be good in winter, if these things get as hot in proportion as my laptop battery does, though. I'd have an inbuilt heater. But would I need to clip a fire extinguisher to my wheelchair just in case it did a Boeing on me?

Anyway, a hundred and fifty quid? I don't have that sort of money to chuck around. I'm not a golfer. And any more of this government's damned cuts, I'll need that. I'll be scrabbling around down the back of the settee looking for stray five pence coins, let alone a tenner.

Independence costs, doesn't it? More than I ever imagined when I had more of it.

No comments:

Post a Comment