On shopping for a wheelchair

I will start by clarifying something from my previous post. When I go home, I will have return the wheelchair and the crutches to the Lindsay as they belong to the rehab institute. That is, if I am not at least nominally a resident there, I don’t get to use their technical aids. However, as a car accident victim, the SAAQ will in all likelihood pay for them.

My Occupational Therapist was quite sure that the SAAQ would pay for two wheelchairs: one for use in my home and another for use from my vehicle so I would not have to move a wheelchair up and down two flights of stairs. It was a kind thought, but one which failed to understand my particular transport arrangements. I don’t have “a vehicle” which I regularly use and in which I might store a wheelchair on full time basis. 

She did give me some urls to the two main wheelchair stores in Montreal along with some advice on what to look for. The two main catchwords were “folding” and “manual”. The former should be fairly self-explanatory, but the latter bears explanation. Setting aside electric wheelchairs, a surprising number of wheelchairs are made with four small wheels rather than two large wheels and two small wheels. The four small wheeled chairs are intended to be pushed by another person rather than propelled by the occupant. These are sometimes known as transfer chairs. The other type (two large, two small) are “manual” wheelchairs. I added two other criteria to the list namely lightweight and equipped with a footrest suitable for my left leg which can’t bend as much as it should.

The first store I went to was La Maison André Vigier. This was something of a confrontation of a personal bête noir. I will digress to explain. Way back in the mists of time when I was in my last year of high school, I was on the school Génies en herbe team, e.g. a trivia quiz team. My presence on the team was due to not only my intelligence, but also because I was an Anglo and therefore had a different knowledge base than my francophone teammates. Anyway, we went to Montreal to be filmed for the TV version of the game on Radio-Canada. We lost partly because I was given a question that seemed designed to trip up an anglophone: “Quelle est la rivière qui coule à Londres?” The answer is la Tamise not le Thames. The real downer question was a forty point question to identify a handicapped athlete from Sherbrooke. I hadn’t a clue through all the other players did. Unfortunately, someone on the other team was first to push the buzzer. The answer was André Vigier.

Anyway, I suspect I might have done better at another Maison André Vigier location than the one in Verdun. The store seemed relatively small and the lone employee wasn’t as helpful as she might have been. I had gone with the intention of renting, but when I said it might be as long as six months (a cynical number based on not all that much information), she said it would be better to buy. She gave an example of how much it might cost which seemed not unreasonable. I tried a few combinations of chairs and seat cushions. There was one that met most of my conditions except for the footrest requirements. When I pressed her about possibly getting another footrest for the chair, she acted as if she’d never heard of the like. I was not terribly impressed so I said I would think about it.

I walked with crutches across the street to have lunch at Monsieur Dumpling. Afterwards, I phoned my friendly taxi driver to see if he might drive to a Medicus store on Sherbrooke Street East. He was available so off I went. That store was bigger and had much more knowledgeable staff. I ended up buying a chair that met my requirements and indeed was less expensive than the one I had been looking at chez André Vigier. 

That may explain why I tipped my friendly taxi driver the way I did. Jonas the taxi driver is extremely nice to the point that it is slightly maddening that when he hands you the credit card machine, there is no way of leaving a tip! However, until very recently, he had worked for Transport Adapté and therefore had a lot of handicapped clients. On a previous trip, he had mentioned a widget someone had told him about which could be put in the lock loop in a car door frame and serve as a handle. He hadn’t been able to find one. However, while I was waiting to pay for the wheelchair and its cushion, I noticed that the store had some. So I bought one, making sure it was on a separate bill from the wheelchair and cushion. He was suitably grateful when I surprised him with it back at the Lindsay. (He drove me back from Medicus.)

When I posted a picture of the new wheelchair on Facebook, Margaret made comment about being able to bling it out. This put me in mind of an old Bloom County cartoon. Google being Google, I was able to find it.