In his memoir, Moving Violations, gimp journalist John Hockenberry writes about the fine sunny day he was merrily rolling along the streets of downtown Chicago, and then he attempted to cross the hectic intersection of Wacker and Michigan. Just as he entered the street, a bus turned the corner and one of its front wheels was coming directly at him. Hockenberry managed to jump free of his wheelchair and with his gloved hands pull himself on the pavement out of the way of the oncoming wheel:
"There were two sharp popping sounds as the bus tire crushed and destroyed the wheelchair. My thin high-pressured tires exploded as the bus came to a complete stop. The chair was directly under the right front tire of the bus. I was sitting on the pavement a few feet back.
"An ambulance arrived. Two paramedics ran over to me and asked if I had been hit by the bus. 'Yes,' I said. 'Can you walk?' they asked. 'No,' I said. 'Get the stretcher," one yelled. 'Can you feel your legs?' he asked. There didn't seem to be a way into this conversation. 'Look, I'm a paraplegic. ...' 'Not necessarily, son,' the paramedic said hopefully."
It's totaled!
Sometimes the wheelchair life is a demolition derby, and when you least expect it. The wheelchair is wiped out, but the occupant lives to tell about it. And you don't even have to be some stupid daredevil playing chicken with cliffs and brick walls. Sometimes trouble comes looking for you.
Mia Coulter was crossing a Chicago intersection not far from her apartment building. She was almost home after a night of pizza and drinks with friends. The light changed before she made it across, and a Chicago Sun-Times newspaper truck came barreling on through.
"I'm between the two headlights. The driver pushes me over and the truck is on top of me. I got pushed about three feet. He's crushing me in my chair. I'm screaming as I'm under the truck. He stops as he hears me scream and he backs the truck up. As he backs up, I pop out of the chair. I sprung out about another three feet," says Coulter.
Fortunately, it all happened right in front of a police station, so the police and paramedics got there almost immediately. Coulter was unconscious when they took her to the hospital and ended up with deep bruises, internal injuries and a nasty gash on her leg.
Richard Lewis, one of my favorite wheelchair repair/sales guys, came to collect Coulter's mangled motorized Permobil. "The truck took the whole armrest and bent it across the front where her chest would be. The tire was actually on top of the seat and bent the whole seat pan down." And yet, Lewis could still drive the chair. "The system still worked, but it was bent to crap!"
As Coulter watched Lewis leave with her chair, she said to herself, "I can't believe my chair is gone. I can't believe I endured that much pain and actually lived."
These days, Lewis is a sales manager for Permobil. But during his 20 years in the business, he's had to pronounce many chairs DOA, or, as he prefers to call them, FUBAR (f***ed up beyond all repair).
The absolute worst case Lewis has seen involved a man from Wisconsin. "He was driving back from a trip and he went off the road a little bit. He had his nephew in the car, and his nephew grabbed his hand control and tried to pull it back on the road. But it was so sensitive that the van flipped and it rolled four times and into a ditch. The chair cracked in three places and batteries flew out of the rear window. He ended up in the back seat, still attached to the wheelchair seating system. The base of the chair was still secured in the front. He sustained minor injuries and his nephew was fine."
Dave Knight, who works for Metro Rehab in suburban Chicago, is my other favorite wheelchair repair/sales guy. He once hauled away the smashed chair of a teenage kid who was hit by a car. "The other part of the tragedy was the lawyer who ran up and gave him a business card. A friend of mine who's a lawyer said there are some lawyers who'll pay somebody 50 bucks or so to lightly clip somebody and then the lawyer runs up and gives them a business card." The wheelchair-chasing lawyer took his 30 percent of the insurance settlement, Knight says, which was about $8,000. But since the teenage kid could only legally collect the cost of a replacement chair, after the lawyer's cut he was $8,000 short.
Water, especially corrosive salt water, can also quickly render a chair FUBAR. Lewis once got an SOS call from a Milwaukee family who had just returned from vacation in Mexico. The middle-school-aged son frolicked on the beach with his motorized chair. "He was racing the waves," says Lewis. "But a wave came crashing over the top of the chair. He was submerged. The whole thing was packed full of sand. The motors and battery box were full of sand. The case that housed electronics was full of sand. I needed a shovel to get to the electronics. It was FUBAR."
Greg Smith ["Greg Smith: He's On A Roll," April 1997] lives on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico in Ocean Springs, Miss. When he and his family fled Hurricane Katrina, he made a big mistake. "I left my modified minivan and my power wheelchair in the garage," he says. They returned five days later. "Our house, which is elevated 21 feet above the bayou in our backyard, was flooded with 4 feet of water. During the storm, my chair bathed in salt water. It looked normal except for the water that drained from the frame whenever we tried to push the chair. Everything on the first floor ended up in a massive garbage heap in the front of our house. It was very difficult to see the waste management bulldozer scoop up my wheelchair, along with beds, appliances and everything else we owned. I had to live in a nursing home for three months after that. For three weeks, I lived as a complete invalid."
The Not-So-Friendly Skies
And what about stories of airlines totaling chairs?
"I've got tons of those," Lewis says. A guy was on a plane heading for vacation in San Francisco. His wheelchair was so customized that the seating system alone cost $4,000. And while it was being loaded into the cargo bay, it fell off the conveyor belt. "All the parts and pieces went flying everywhere. He was witnessing the whole thing from the window. The whole front rigging was ripped off. The cushion was ripped off. He was basically stranded when he got there," says Lewis.
Knight's got bone-chilling airline stories of his own. A guy got carried off the airplane but his chair wasn't there. He was told it was down in baggage claim. "They get to the baggage area and there it is coming down the conveyor belt. That thing was lying on its side and just came flying down and slammed into a suitcase at the bottom. The frame was bent in multiple places," says Knight.
Lewis says in his experience airlines are by far the leading cause of FUBAR chairs, distantly followed by car and pedestrian accidents.
And so the moral of the story is, if you don't want your chair totaled, don't ever fly. And don't go anywhere in a vehicle or attempt to cross the street, either. Better play it safe and never go anywhere at all. In fact, maybe you ought to just stay home and hide under the bed.
