Actually unbelievable, but you are sitting with a black cap in the sun at 28°C in the shade with your head being cooled.
“Only” water is put on this cap, like on the vest, about 0,3 liter. The fleece on the inside of the cap absorbs the water, and the cap virtually sweats and cools.
Ingenious!!!
Unfortunately my match was cancelled, I forgot my tennis shoes.
After a few months in the hospital you get on rather friendly terms with nurses and physicians.
Of course a little piece of humour belongs to it as well.
If one as quadriplegic (spinal injury in the cervical area) like me can’t use arms and hands in an efficient way any more, spaghetti are not the favourite type of pasta.
One day the nurse came with the lunch, it was spaghetti, put it on my bedside table and was waiting for my comment if he could cut the pasta for me.
He was waiting for the comment in vain. I tried to eat these long objects by myself, have to see it sportingly, luckily I was not hungry…
It was a perfect show!!!
At some time a physician came into the room and watched this scenario with the pasta and me slightly grinning, but didn’t propose to cut the pasta neither, and I wasn’t keen on asking her.
I said to her that next time when the food is spaghetti again I would be motorised. I would only need two tie wraps to fix a fork. But had the suspicion that my milk frother would be a little bit too fast. We both had some fun. She didn’t seriously believe the thing about motorisation.
I only thought: You don’t know me!!!
Have a look yourself, one week later the
9,5 Volt Spaghetti Tetra Fork
About risks and generated injuries please contact your physician, nurse or nearest do-it-yourself-store staff.
Addendum: Construction manual for spaghetti tetra bit by popular request.
Saw a standard fork off and forge it flat. Really flat.
Saw approx. 5 cm off an M6 Allen key and weld it lengthwise to the fork stump. Not to the tine, I know it can happen!!!
Polish the welding seam with a one hand angle grinder. If possible keep a little bit of the welding.
Balance the bit at low speed on a drill press with a rubber mallet like a car tyre. Placing additional weight is not absolutely necessary.
Buy a cordless electric screwdriver with very low rotation speed, otherwise the special fork can be used to whip cream.
Boil spaghetti, and it’s done.
Safety instruction: Don’t start screwdriver with fork brought into the mouth, otherwise only the dentist will be happy.
paid by their health insurance. This would be so great, you could be standing again in your favourite pub at the bar to have a drink, and you would be able to get a coffee mug from above out of the cupboard without problems.
All this might be correct, but the question is, did the “standing wheelchair” get a medical device number for this ?
Everybody should be clear that coffee mug transportation from the cupboard and “standing elimination” of draught beer in general don’t belong to primary health care, therefore the public health insurance would cover the costs only in exceptional cases.
Furthermore the insurance would have paid already for an everyday wheelchair for sure with which you can also get drunk. So why a second…
I am outing myself, I have such a chair, and it is medically reasonable!!!
But officially it is not a standing wheelchair, but a
Standing chair or Standing exercise device
I repeat again, why should the insurance pay for two wheelchairs…
Everybody knows it, you were lying in bed with the flu for 3 days, and when getting up you see little stars first because you feel dizzy.
After my accident I have looked at the ceiling in hospital for 9 weeks and claim since then that I knew all shades of white.
During 8 months I was buckled up each day for 1 hour on a tilt table and tilted upwards as on a torture rack to permanently stabilise my circulation without additional medication.
Furthermore the standing chair helps to prevent muscle wasting and pressure sores.
After I was home also my tilt table was gone. My circulation was not happy at all with that. Although we para- and quadriplegics are famous for our low blood pressure… with a blood pressure of 42/35 I could still count the drops of my medicine… this was hard. I got a prescription especially for a standing chair, because my blood pressure refused another standing device comparable to a speaker’s desk.
It is incomprehensible, but when using these “standing desks” I felt close to fainting after seconds.
After testing of another device and longer correspondence with my insurance, roundabout a year, which was very fast, I got a
Standing exercise device
l
(ca. 7000€) approved.
Read my blogpost about a handrail (back at the wall) as transfer aid (see older blogpost), from everyday wheelchair to standing chair.
At this point I would like to personally thank all these blithering idiots because of whom the approval of these upscale medical device at the health insurance is understandably so difficult.
If you absolutely want to “stand” at your pub’s bar, buy your standing wheelchair by yourself!!!
Small tip, even if you are not so educated in using a language. In case of non-approval of a medical device by the health insurance consider correct wording and spelling in your objection. Otherwise the correspondence can drag on for years…
I know a case in which the insurance wanted to place an electrical standing wheelchair in re-use which is 10 km/h fast into the living room of a patient in the 1st floor.
This is somehow unusual, but medically absolutely justifiable.
My spinal cord has decided in 2007 that sweating is stupid.
Since then my skin is quite dry
This phenomenon is nothing unusual with para- or quadriplegia.
As a consequence my body temperature rises and rises when it is above 25° C and sun.
This can lead until fainting at approximately 40° C.
A water sprayer for flowers can work miracles (see older blog post), but is not the best solution either.
There are special cooling vests, with thermal packs or fans, well… I think it is too complicated, and you are depending on thermal packs and refrigerators. So I prefer hiding at home and waiting for the winter.
In May I met Sepp Jakober on a technical aids trade fair, the chief engineer of the wheelchair tractive Swisstrac who gave me tuning tips for my Minitrac.
He gave me a vest from the company E-Cooline and said that I would absolutely have to try it. He borrowed it from another booth.
The vest would cool you, you just have to put water on it, the water would not flow out, hard to believe!!!
The vest would absorb the water, virtually sweat and thus cool you.
It was invented for fire fighters.
The cooling vest was working!!!
A quantum leap for quality of live.
I underwent a two-week stress test with the cooling vest in Crete.
It doesn’t get wet, the body feeling can be described as cooling-clammy, but it is not unpleasant.
Be careful with filling water in it as 4 liters fit inside, and then you would have to wait approximately 3 days until you are able to wear this “lead vest” again. There is no water dripping off. 0,5 liters are more than enough for approximately 4 hours at 30°C in the shade.
The Cooline vests are available in a simple design with velcro tape, see picture above, or two rows of snap fasteners and additional removable lower part.
From the same material there are scarfs and caps available which I would like to test as well.
I was able to stroll around at the beach promenade with my wife in the afternoons at 30° C in the shade without water sprayer or wet towel.
The cooling vest made a great holiday possible, and I have just ordered a black vest and cap.
The price of approximately 300 € is not low, but if you bear in mind what you have to pay for good winter clothing or trivial cotton jeans I consider the price justifiable for a vest out of such a high tech material.
This vest opens so many possibilities for me, I don’t have to hide any more in summer!!!
The only disadvantage is that the vest weighs around 4 kg after washing and you have to wait 3-4 days until it has dried again.
You can purchase these vests from E-Cooline
Unfortunately these vests don’t have a medical device number. With an adequate prescription and statement from the doctor some health insurances would bear the expenses.
My friend always tells me that I have a static like
Bernd das Brot
(German kids television character, an ill-humoured bread)
Long torso, short arms and short legs.
Therefore the transfer from wheelchair to car belongs – because I can’t stand and the door sills are becoming wider and wider – into the realms of fantasy.
This gap is insurmountable for me. Many wheelers have the same challenge (I have abolished all “problems” years ago, see front page) and use a slide board, with which they glide as elegantly as possible from wheelchair to car seat. To learn this there was once a
brand new car lifted with a tower crane in the 9th floor
of a hospital in Frankfurt which is standing since then in the corridor of the occupational therapy.
The car won’t be stolen for sure!!!
Almost all car customizing companies offer a permanently mounted foldaway slide board, with which one can transfer relatively save to the driver seat.
Why one is dragged at the trouser waistband into a car at rehabilitation fairs and the International Automobile Exhibition (IAA) in Frankfurt, because these “specialist companies” don’t even have a slide board with them, is incomprehensible for me. Usually a mounted slide board should be part of the basic equipment.
Only on demand I got an offer for a foldaway slide board.
Get yourself a
permanently mounted slide board
fitted if you also have difficulties with the transfers.
You can drive with the wheelchair directly to the transfer board.
As you can see perceived 2 kg key chains are normal for me!
My daily consumption of various pills against all and everything which partially remind of suppositories in their form is altogether a complete meal.
I enjoy them in the meantime like gummi bears.
The colours are great, but the industry still needs to work a little on the taste.
Michelin-Starsfor the most delicious dope, that would be something.
According to the motto: A problem shared is a problem halved, some pills might be halved and quartered.
Luckily my wife takes over the weekly pill destruction.
If I would try this by myself I would have probably gone into the light out of despair (suicidal tendencies).
I have found a
Pill splitter type Apex Ultra
which is really working and has additional protection at the blade.
It is hardly believable but it has a price incl. shipment of less than 10 €!
Everything accessible, 2 pools with lifters, a store for medical supply next door, etc.
Everything great, apart from one little thing:
Tenerife is a volcano island, and the hotel is on top of a hill, fantastic…!
A Paralympics participant might be able to conquer this mountain by himself, but not me, never ever.
Many hotel guests bring their own electric wheelchairs from Germany which often become victims of the airlines, or they rent a scooter during their stay.
I once got the tip when I am down at the beach and would like to go up to the hotel again, to wait for the next electric wheelchair driver and tow myself on to him.
Well, I didn’t rent a scooter, but already for the second time a wheelchair tractive.
I already reported in October 2010 about my positive experience with this tractive type:
By coincidence I got the offer in Tenerife to buy a Trac in black, even fitting my wheelchair colour.
I could not resist and acquired my approximately 10 year old, new toy.
The re-import of the once in Germany produced Minitrac from Spain was a little bit difficult.
At the check-in at Tenerife airport, a slightly panic flight passenger broke off the steering linkage. The thing was fairly crashed.
In Frankfurt my own wheelchair was damaged as well so that I could not ride it on my own because the wheel was rubbing at the brake.
With all the luggage and a little overstrained lady from the airport handicapped service it was a perfect mess.
Without the help of my wife I probably would still be standing in Terminal 1.
After a first repair of the steering linkage of the Minitrac and a set of new batteries the first rides in Frankfurt could be made.
This thing rides only with 6 km/h, therefore doesn’t need a license plate and doesn’t have any constraints from the technical control association. Some ideas come to my mind immediately what could be changed . Wait and see…
If you are typing with only one finger like me some tips fall by the wayside for lack of typing. But therefore one talks to another!
If ideas are helping other handicapped, and they are publishing these in other medias, i.e. typing for me, then I take the freedom, do it like Guttenberg and copy it:
Many tips are received on Tenerife in the health resort Mar y Sol from other concerned people. Steffen (alias for Rollinator), wheelchair user as well, brought me to a great medical device:
Both my wheelchair and my stairlift have sharp edges on which I hurt my heels occasionally.
Additionally my legs angle spastically in the night and thus the foot is rubbing tightly across the bed sheet with the heel.
Result is a bedsore at the heel.
Although there are special cushions which are fixed with Velcro strips, they are not useful for me. Due to strong leg movement unfortunately the cushion is not where it should be any more the next morning. Steffen recommended a
Tubular Bandage from towelling
(Nobafrott PZN 7094346), which usually doesn’t slip off and led to the healing of the bedsore.
I bought the bandage rather low priced at the HAD pharmacy (vitaware.de) for 85,09 Euro. The length of the bandage should be generously measured – can be cut from the 5 m.
Source: Olaf
When I sleep a night with the “socks” I don’t have swollen feet in the morning anymore.
The use of the tubular bandage has to be discussed with the physician for possible thrombosis risk or blood pressure problems!
We don’t want to harm anybody and assume no liability.
The photo with the crossed socks reminds a bit of a pirate flag, “Mouse Ahoy”!
In general I don’t give way to panic and usually am not even afraid when I am carried up or down a stairway, provided that the volunteers don’t have 1,5 per mill blood alcohol level and are able to stand on their own.
The only thing which makes me uneasy is to get in and out of the car in the dark – we wheelchair users are not always home after dark although this is the general opinion.
In this process the car door has to be completely opened for the whole time, and I don’t want to end up as figurehead of another car driver.
To be seen better in the dark by other car drivers and provide a nice view to passers-by I have decorated my
driver’s door type Christmas tree
a little bit:
Red plastic reflectors from car accessories attached to the driver’s door from the outside which are also visible from the front.
Red adhesive reflectors, stuck to the inside of the door.
A small battery-operated white LED lamp is stuck to the door with double-faced adhesive Velcro tape!
The absolute highlight is a blinking neon yellow-green battery-operated fluorescent bar.
I have introduced this part already in my blogpost from 09.03.2011(see older blogpost).
Safety instruction: The fluorescent bar causes nausea and insanity in the long run.
As you can gather from my words I am already beyond saving for years!
If you are like me major customer of the pharmaceutical industry you should expect that the pills will be delivered already sorted according to intake date and daytime.
Because unfortunately this is not the case you have to prepare your daily dope yourself.
To elicit the pills out of the blister there are except from the well-tried “I squeeze hard with my thumb” technique the most different technical aids.
To what extent these pieces are useful is of course depending on the particular handicap of the user.
Here is a small selection:
With this a little futuristic appearing
double cone,
you are able to squeeze the pills out with one hand. But only very few fit into the collecting bowl.
This small
Taiwanese Pill Puncher
you should always use very gently. Sometimes you have to cut the blisters so that you can also squeeze out middle sized pills. But it is more robust than it looks like.
New on the market is this
German metal model.
Developed and built by a locksmithery. Not suitable for capsules, the spring steel sheet has to be bent back again and again. But the white bowl can be removed which might be quite useful.
On the American market I have found this
Pill Puncher.
My current winner. Simple and well-thought. The collecting bowl is the entire square lower part with which the pills can be emptied after squeezing them out like with a shovel.
I haven’t found a pill puncher yet which I can use reasonably with my buckled fingers. If you know or use other types please write a comment, or e-mail as usual to rollinator@eigude.de .
With a height of 2,38 m, width of 1.5 m and depth of 60 cm really a lot fits into a bedroom closet.
(Back in time I transported it as construction kit in my VW Golf 2).
I have quite a couple of shirts.
The bad thing with this closet is that I can’t reach up there anyway with my 1,38 m sitting in the wheelchair. With this depth I don’t see much either what is hidden in there. The attempt to get something out of the closet from behind probably results in an involuntary wheelchair-floor-transfer.
Down in the closet it’s not better either.
With the usual shelves a pile of 15 shirts remains for selection in the end. These fall out of the closet, or you have to rely on your assistant’s taste.
(I don’t like “pink T-shirts”).
The Swedish plywood constructors offer with their
Modular system “Pax”
drawers in the closet.
Now everything is within reach even from a wheelchair and you can also reach the shirts in the back of the closet which are usually inaccessible.
Beware of the polar bear!
(He is watching over me since my accident 2007).
technical aids for fairly all needs, with medical device number!
(In the English version it is possible to search the databases on Technical Aids, Case Studies, Addresses, Research and Literature. A search in all eight databases is only possible in the German version.)
I will be pleased to help you on how you will get the selected parts, or if you have questions concerning the parts.
Caution, highly addictive! If you find something cool please send an e-mail.
You should take your time with the selection of the adapted washing basin.
In my opinion, a height adjustable luxury basin is not necessary if the wheelchair user is not a child.
Basically you should be able to agree with your partner on the mounting height, as long as the partner is not Dirk Nowitzki!
The wheelchair has to fit even with passenger underneath the washing basin.
Better remind your plumber!
Stupidly most of the washing basins are not large enough so that you are standing with the feet against the wall, and you still have to bend forward over the very expensive special washing basin.
Great!!
I consider it as advantage if the washing basin has little “wings” on the right and left side, so that the storage space is substantially larger and better to reach.
The mounting height of the disabled toilet is according to my information at approx. 40 cm. This really has a reasonable cause.
Above 40 cm it is not possible to drive with a shower commode chair without reconstruction over the toilet. I would like to meet the plumber who knows that.
Even in designated wheelchair hotels the toilet height can be different in each room. Everybody does what he wants.
What is interesting is that some health insurances cover either the costs for a shower commode chair, or for holding bars next to the toilet.
Thus relatively fit wheelers use the shower chair for the shower and are then obliged to use it for the daily “sitting” even though they could swing onto the toilet lid if they had the money for holding bars. The bars are shockingly expensive, I have some low priced producers in my data base.
If you need a rubber ring for the toilet seat, of course you have free choice for the mounting height.
By coincidence I got two holding bars out of stainless steel for 21 € in Ebay. The value of the material is already significantly higher. The bars don’t only look good, they are also doing well as towel rail.
An acquaintance of mine doesn’t care at all.
He is taking a shower with his “normal” wheelchair. His cushion never gets wet. He probably has one, but doesn’t sit on it even during the day.
To be continued.
Click on tag “Bath Reconstruction” to read the other blogposts of the series.
As already mentioned in several blogposts I am convinced that a set of
mountainbike wheelchair tyres
should be provided with the basic equipment of the first wheelchair.
Somehow a secret is made around the big advantage of these tyres.
For me, these tyres are no surplus luxury goods, or poser sport equipment, but a medical necessity so that a justification for the prescription of a medical device, the request for approval at the health insurance, is basically given.
Due to the wider-based tyres the security increases especially in cities with cobble stone because you don’t get stuck in the joints so often anymore.
Many shocks due to bad ground conditions are absorbed by the tyres, thus the spinal cord respectively the whole body is not strained so much anymore. Your back and bottom will be happy.
The wheelchair pusher is relieved very much on bad trails, mud, ice and snow…
The argument that you make no headway with these wheels is very much depending on the tyres, but not overall correct. The advantages predominate. I recommend a Schwalbe Land Cruiser as tyre.
The disadvantage of the wheels is the broadening of the whole wheelchair. Too bad if you don’t fit into the garage anymore.
I don’t know to which extent it is medically important for the health insurance that the wheeler can leave his home even in snow drift. You could catch a cold, but the groceries of the most important things like coffee, chocolate and condoms… should be ensured in winter as well.
With prices for a set of mountainbike wheelchair tyres from 560 € – 900 € from the wheelchair producers I understand everybody who refuses to buy them because actually these are “only” wheelchair tyres with a 10 – 20 € bicycle rim with bicycle tube and tyre.
As a matter of principle I refuse to pay such exorbitant prices. For the same money you can get already a really nice complete mountainbike. Thus I have let me built two wheelchair tyres for around 220 €.
Yesterday I have found a wheelchair replacement part company in the nearer abroad who charge per piece
wheelchair mountainbike tyre 117€
This price is more than reasonable.
You shouldn’t forget the insurance aspect. With do-it-yourself constructions you can get into trouble if something is happening.
The company is currently closed until January.
I have ordered a quite special
wheelchair hand rim for quadriplegics
from this company with which I hope to ride a little out in the snow by myself.
Of course I will write if the ordering should work.
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