Expletives Not Deleted

You can always count on ALS to fuck up your life plans. That's why I rarely make any kind of date certain commitment. You just never know what living with ALS is going to throw at you. Take my wheelchair, for instance. Or rather, please don't take it; the replacement chairs are crap.

The other day, while on our road trip, somehow I managed to break my wheelchair. The truth is that my chair takes a heck of a pounding. Eventually something's gotta give. In this case it was the clips that hold the bracing bars in place on the X-frame underneath the seat. These bars essentially ensure that the chair expands fully when folded out, and hold the wheels vertical when the chair is folded up. They are important but not critical. When they broke, I decided to keep using the chair and get it fixed here at home.

Normally what I would have done is gone to the wheelchair shop and had the part ordered. When it came in, I would go back to the shop and have the repair completed. However, since I have no elevator, I cannot just go to the shop. So the shop sent a couple of guys to me today. They picked up my wheelchair and dropped off a loaner. I've been told that the parts might take as much as a couple of weeks to come in, or they might be sooner. Nobody knows for sure.

Now... this loaner wheelchair is not a top of the line model. In fact, it is the reverse. It is your basic, low end, heavily constructed wheelchair. It has smaller wheels than mine. It has a poorer quality bearing system than mine. It has a smaller seat than mine. The arms on the chair cannot be folded up; they have to be removed. And, worst of all, it's too low for any sort of transfer that I am used to, including the transfer into my bed and the transfer into my truck. All in all, it's a crap chair, the kind the government offered me when I was first diagnosed. There is a reason I bought a good chair; I've been reminded of how good.

This chair means I almost certainly won't be able to get from my wheelchair to my truck, at least not without substantial assistance. The same is true for any transfer to any bed, even one at the correct height; I had to use my sling today to get into my own bed. And this means, for a near certainty, that I will not be solo road-tripping with this loaner wheelchair. I am, once again, trapped in the prison of my life.

So no road trip, no elevator escape, no get away from entrapment. And I get to sit in this piece of shit wheelchair until mine is fixed. Fuck, I hate this life!