FYI Creative Research Project Technology Cut
sliding board is just a board that's been cut out with round corners but you wouldn't catch anything and a material that is slippery so that when i sit on it i will slide across and get in bed with somebody standing behind me and basically if that board goes here and somebody would stand behind me when not with this chair i was in a manual chair and grab the back of my pants and i would push this way on the board until my butt was over there once my butt was over there they would pick up my legs and i would be in bed then so this one's called a sit on sling and it's pretty basic not a real problem some of the other slings are a little bit harder to work with because a person that doesn't have their balance they're called an open slang in an open sling the person can actually fall through so this particular one is much safer for someone whose balance is a problem this is these kinds of lifts were made about 20 years ago which as you can see is a lot easier and a lot easier on the person taking care of me they don't pull or push or anything else that's and it just goes down and we're camera and the rail system that's in the ceiling that this goes all the way into the bathroom and can be lowered on the toilet also um we had to get what's called an alternating pressure mattress cover and first of all he has a special mattress from the va that's specially made for him and then because of his skin breaking down he has to have this particular mattress that's supposed to be doing alternating i'm not sure what happened these will go down while these are up and one will be hard one row will be hard and the other row will be soft and that's to keep his body in constant movement so that his skin doesn't break down you might wonder why do we have to tape all the wiring together that's in order to keep it so that it doesn't fall off the bed in a way that he can't get a hold of it by putting them together they don't get all tangled up because the control for the bed is also on a cord with a hand piece to it so that he can get it that's actually designed for a quadriplegic because it's got a hook where somebody can't just grab it i think it was back in the probably 35 years ago actually a woman designed the kind of chair that i'm in now that looks more modern and fits into society and the chair that they make is used also for pressure release this one here will actually this one will actually go up and go down so i can fit into any place and what i found after getting this chair that a lot of social events that i went to uh it seemed like more people would come up and talk to me if i was more at their level than i was lower now this is only one of the features on this chair but we are going to go back to the pressure release thing we have a headrest for the chair but it's not on or what they do now for the chair for head row for pressures this cheryl chill backwards and you've got a head rest down here it's almost like being a lazy boy so this also will create take pressure off the butt and actually i've put this thing back and fell asleep in quite a few times if kathy does it around put me to bed i'll just crank it back so these are the kinds of things that have been developed in the last probably 35 or 40 years that has made it easy people would not consider when they see somebody in a wheelchair they just feel they can't move their legs but this type of injury that i have without the finger dexterity actually i've been blessed to places that i've been able to go do uh really is a a challenge because people don't understand or they want to shake hands with you or they want to drop change there or hand me a bag that you can't grab and ends up dropping on the floor so it it's it's a it's a challenge and something to really give some thought to is how to go through your day without being able to use your hands nobody thinks of those kind of things i never did think of it before i got hurt and it takes a lot of thought or throwing in the towel to realize how to be able to do things that you want to do without your hands and one of the things that somebody made was another quadriplegic because naturally when i drop anything on the floor i can't pick it up when i was in the manual chair i still couldn't pick it up even if i had the dexterity i could touch the floor in the manual chair but naturally i couldn't pick it up so it was either asking a wrapping masking tape around my hand and sticking to it or picking it up that way but a quadriplegic invented this thing 14 15 years ago and without the finger dexterity they custom made just to fit your uh forearm and your hand here and as you can see this closes up this closes up and you can drop it on the floor and basically i've even picked up coins with this thing so it stops kathleen or anybody else that's around to make me more independent one of the other things is the i use a computer a lot and i've tried the voice activated but the voice activated wasn't really what can i say it wasn't really as good as it is now so i still use a keyboard and what i ended up doing is i found a corkscrew a wooden corkscrew this one's about 15 20 years old yeah this is just a wooden cork screw because this comes off and so for opening wine bottles so this is what i use on the keyboard and i put rubber bands because it would slip between my hands uh i can't use a plastic one or i can't use a pencil or because they're too thin and for probably i probably say for the first 30 years of my life i had some motion in this thumb and so i was able to uh hold a pen secure a pen like this and write like this and write able to write on paper but since i been using that so much and it hasn't developed i lost that ability and so i've been looking for fat pens and everything else but still i'm having kathleen write checks out now because i haven't found anything that i can use all the cups that i have in the house have handles on them uh anything you can buy a water truck all has handles on them and the other thing which people really wouldn't consider is i think it's kind of funny but i can't keep things in my lap because of the paralysis my legs will fall apart so for a long time i have to get a tv tray a small tv train i said that i carry around keep on my lap or a towel to keep things from falling through and stuff usually kathleen opens all my bottles that's about the only two things i got a back scratcher that i use to when kathleen comes in or somebody pushes things out of my way i use this back scratcher up here on the table and then when i usually write because i can't hold paper down i had somebody take who went to colorado was a gunsmith and he found a old railroad piece of old railroad it was like four feet and he cut it down for me and polished it so when i go to right i put that on top of the paper so the paper doesn't slide me please with this car this door is 36 and even in the houses built today there's still only 30 for an ambulatory person so if any handicapped person moves in the house they'll have to have these doors now without my finger dexterity uh i had handles put on the doors rather than i had to back up all this stuff here all this kid stuff grandkids stuff but i have handles rather than not because of this my hands so i can just go yeah i will get closer like that and this is there's this other trick that happens stay there john coming out is also if you're here by yourself or there's nobody here there's a piece of rope hanging from the door so what i would do is just turn the chair around grab this it's got a loop on it i could stick my thumbnail just slowly back out close the door and you can see now that the whole kitchen area is open to move around to do anything i want i can raise the chair to get at the sink or to use anything at the sink if i need anything to put on the counters i can raise on the chair these altercations were just done three years ago when i had a manual i didn't have this and so when the kit the house was originally built we had the original kitchen in and i was in a manual chair and i could still reach it because this was a little lower and then they made that stand over here for me to to be able to use what i want to do things i guess you can see all the handles on the drawers i'm not knobs and i can put my finger in here this ability to hold but this thumb to hold something i could put a fork in there like that and eat and it was usually would hold because i could put that thumb up but when i lost that i had to move to a a specially made wider handle that i could pick up things with without a problem it's even got bumps on it doesn't it yeah that makes it better and as you can see all my cups have handles on them all those handles that we put on the doors on the inside also and when i was in my first manual chair it was only 30 inches wide and the length i don't exactly remember but as i got older and i lost my muscle elasticity they had to put me in the 32-inch wine chair and they had to lengthen the chair which did cause some problems because uh in the house not so much going through the doorways but going around down the hall and because of that we're going to take that one corner and round it out that's in the hall you see when i go out that the because the chair is longer it is i really got to take it slow and if you look at some of the walls that i hit that's why this corner is going to be taken down and cornered and it's going to be rounded off so naturally all the closets have these kind of sliding doors without a problem the front door has a handle on it also and as you see with the 36 inch i can just get in here one of the things that ada does require in a bathroom is that the wheelchair is being able to maneuver itself all the way around when i was first the house was first built i had a star but it wasn't as wide and it wasn't built to aviate any standards because that was back in 68. so they built that with stamina they came back and remodeled this uh three years ago the add standards and it's the same with the sink they raised it higher because i could get this higher and i could fit under there all the pipes are wrapped so i can't burn myself everything has to be out so that he can reach it but when they had the mirror hanging like a regular mirror but when ed would roll in he couldn't see himself in the mirror so they put it on a hinge that allows it to be angled just right so that he can actually use the mirror all the furniture is way out to the walls there's nothing like you don't make these little areas for people to sit and have conversation i mean you can't put a small anything anywhere a table or anything i never would have understood but the old microwaves when you opened it you could take the door and put it back a little bit and so ed would be able to push it back put something in and take it out and he could do that so we had a small microwave down on the counter but in about the last four years they do not make microwaves that have a door that goes further than a right angle because you can't put the chair sideways to get anything out because the door's in the way so that was another problem and i didn't know but when they remodeled our home they put this side-by-side refrigerator in and i thought that was great it's a beautiful refrigerator but pop can't use it there's no way he can use it i'm not sure why still i haven't figured that out but show me what the what the problem is i can't get it there are single shots smaller shelves and i can't get my fingers in there that's part of the problem now my fingers are even if we got it open there was still another problem with it right even if i got if even if you could open the door see i can't get the other refrigerator open swing like the microwave but if i was to try to get anything in there i'd be hitting the door this way or the other way and so the other refrigerator all opened up fully where i could reach it and i never would have thought of that that's the other thing with um over time because of the injury the way it was uh my fingers atrophied so they don't open up but it's good because if i hook something i can pull but some of the quadriplegics of their different types of injuries their hands just flop around and they just their fingers are just open but i'm advanced to me is i can get something like this if i hook it like the doors and stuff and pull it and the fingers won't start out won't open up because they're all atrophied
2022-05-08 05:21
