4 changes I made to my new wheelchair
Getting a new wheelchair is a big deal. Not so much because the right choice will make everything magical and sparkly, but getting the wrong wheelchair has the potential to make things difficult to varying degrees. As someone who uses their wheelchair all day, every day, I want (or need) it to do one thing – it’s job.
I see my wheelchair as a tool. A tool that I use to improve my mobility. When it’s good, it should fit seamlessly into my life and be something that never really crosses my mind. It’s there and it works.
Joe Swanson in Family Guy parody of Full Metal Jacket
After using wheelchairs for more than 16 years, I’ve found that the average life span of the wheelchairs that I’ve had in that time has been between 3 and 5 years. Let’s do the maths on that. I wake up at 7am and go to bed at 11pm. That’s 16 hours per day. I use my wheelchair for every one of the 365 days in the year. So for the average life span of a wheelchair (5 years in this example), I’m going to be using it for just shy of 30,000 hours.
Let that sink in. 30,000 hours.
For a piece of equipment that I’m going to be using that much, I want to:
- spend time thinking about what I need and research what’s out there
- make a financial investment into it, or find other ways to fund it
- have the skills to use the equipment to maximise its benefit in getting me around
I’ve had 4 wheelchairs in total and of those, there are two of them that didn’t break on me. That’s why when I was ready to order my new wheelchair, I knew that I’d go back to ordering the same make - Ti Lite.
When I say that these chairs didn’t break on me, this is not only necessary but also impressive as I really put my wheelchairs through the ringer. For example, the one I have at the moment is the same one that I used when I was working in East London. The daily commute for that job meant I used an inaccessible train station and bounced down a set of 40 steps on a daily basis. That is some rigorous testing.
After 16 years of using a wheelchair and having had 4 wheelchairs previously, you might think that ordering a new one be a straight forward process and it probably should have been. But there was something different when ordering this wheelchair which is the reason that I decided to write this blog about it.
I’m a little embarrassed to say but I’ve been sleep walking into using a wheelchair that didn’t fit me.
Over the years, I’ve been making some changes to my wheelchair. Adding a little more camber on the wheels a bit at a time and I’ve been changing the cushion that I’m using to something that is thinner a more lightweight.
These changes were never massive by themselves and more importantly, it never made the chair unusable. Quite the opposite in fact. The changes in themselves were useful. But each time that I made a change, my seated position was becoming lower and lower to the point where my footplate is almost touching the floor.
So after sleepwalking into a wheelchair that isn’t the best fit, I decided to think about what changes I wanted on my new chair to make sure that it’s the best fit for me, making sure that it gives me maximum support and fulfils its function. Here are the 4 things that I decided to change:
1. Height of the backrest
Back when I first started using a wheelchair, I really wanted to minimise everything about it. I didn’t want armrests. I didn’t want handles. I didn’t want anti tip bars. The brakes should fold out of sight. I took the calf strap off. I remember that at one point I even thought about cutting the axel off. Madness.
One of the changes that I made myself was to lower the backrest. Most chairs allow you to do this to some degree. On my first chair, I lowered it as much as I could then when ordering the next chair, I ordered a lower back then readjusted it to be even lower.
I found there were benefits to having a lower back in allowing me to turn more an getting it in and out of the car was easier. But I negated its primary function which is to give support. I realised that on my latest chair I was using a backrest that was functionally useful in some ways, but was not giving me the support I need for my mid chest (T6) level spinal injury.
I decided to get a slightly higher backrest to offer more support and improve my posture which I felt had suffered with a lower backrest as I had caught myself slouching from time to time.
2. Folding back rest
A bigger backrest is going to be great for my posture, but most changes that you make are going to be a trade off. In the case of a bigger backrest, it was going to be much more difficult to get into my car.
To make sure that I was still able to get my chair across my body when transferring into my car I also got a folding backrest, something that I’ve not had on my last couple of chairs as without having a car it didn’t feel like that feature would be needed.
3. Height of the wheelchair
The changes to the amount of camber on my wheels along with the thinner cushion that I’m now using means that I have a footplate very close to the floor and doesn’t allow my legs in the best position. Keep in mind this won’t be obvious to look at and wasn’t even uncomfortable. But once I started to think about it, I knew that it could be better.
I went for a slightly higher frame on my new wheelchair that allows more ground clearance for my footplate and more room for my legs. The trade off here is in transferring back into the chair, especially when I’m getting off the floor. It’s not the biggest change in height though and leaves me with something that I’m comfortable with.
4. Second camber bar
I really like having camber on my wheels. Much like the reason you see so much camber on sports wheelchairs, I find the speed and turning really useful when getting around.
Having more camber does come with a couple of downsides, one of which I’ve fixed by increasing the height of my wheelchair, but the second would require another change.
More camber on my wheels meant that the wheelchair was wider at the base. I believe that every degree of camber you add to your wheels, you add half an inch to the width. So for my 6 degree of camber, I was adding 3 inches to the width of my chair.
A lot of the time this wasn’t an issue. I’d say that 99% of the time the extra width this is fine. At home all my doorways were wide enough as it’s a new build and when I’m out, I found that most venues were okay too. But there are a few occasions, mainly in older buildings when I may have to squeeze through a doorway or I couldn’t get in at all. This happened a couple of times when travelling which is an extra faff that I could do without.
In order to get the best of both worlds, I decided to order an extra axel that had zero camber, giving me the option to make my chair narrower and easier to get through some of those tighter spaces.
This does require some forward thinking about when I’m going to need the narrower chair, plus about 10 minutes and some Allen keys to switch the axels over.
Getting a new chair
My new chair arrived and it’s a great fit. It certainly feels better that the one I was using before. It did, as always, need a couple of tweaks putting new brakes on and moving the axel slightly further forwards.
When comparing the old chair and new in the pics above, you’ll see that visually there doesn’t seem to be much of a difference. But when I sit in them, they feel worlds apart.
These changes are going to make a difference to how my chair works for me, but at the same time are quite specific to what I need.
When you’re planning on getting a new chair, think about the size of your chair and what it is that you need. It might be that your needs have changed or you might have been making small changes over the years like me.
There is loads of information out there from suppliers, health professionals and more importantly other wheelchair users with lived experience.
