28 April 2011

A fairly standard day. The good doctor working upstairs on his medicolegal reports and me below in the stud,y on my laptop

On his last visit Mick, went to Saffron Waldon and very generously bought me a new speaker stand for my iPod. which had excellent sound quality, The only problem was that the buttons on the remote control were tiny and too strong for me to press. Accordingly, we decided to reinstate my earlier Bose system. The only problem with it is that that it has no scroll system which the new one that Mick bought for me did have. On the other hand the Bose remote control has large soft buttons which are much easier to depress, so we reinstated that and Mick will take the other sound system to Sweden. A win-win situation.

A few days ago I started thinking about the electric wheelchair which I have had stored in my office since it was delivered to me in the autumn with a promise that it could be fitted with chin operated controls in the event that my hand and arm became too weak to operate the controls. It was shortly after the chair was delivered that I moved all my equipment into the study, to avoid going out into the cold weather, so the chair has in fact never been used.

Now that the summer is here and if I’m ever going to use it. Now is the time, I thought about how I would get back into the office in order to get into the chair in the first place and realised that I would no longer be able to walk up the ramp. So this would mean that I would have to be wheelchaired there in the mobile chair and then transferred possibly even with the hoist.,. Then, when I had finised with the electric chair, I would have to drive it back into the office and effect the reverse transfer back into the mobile wheelchair and so on. Quite a performance. Even if I had the electric wheelchair I wondered whether I would ever be able to use it outside the garden and, if so, was it fair to just keep it for that purpose when there might be a much more deserving soul somewhere who could make more use of it ?

Accordingly, as soon as the Easter holiday was over I spoke to Lynne, my OT. about it and explained my thinking. In fact, I was quite ready to ask the wheelchair people to come and take away.

However, to my surprise, Lynne was strongly in favour of me keeping the electric wheelchair. As she said it would give me more freedom and she convinced me that it would be crazy to get rid of it.

On the other hand,’ my lovely’ seems to have taken against the idea as being more trouble than it’s worth, so I have to convince her. If we rethink the storage, which could be in the hall, where the other chair is at present and where the it could be plugged in and kept charged. Then by repositioning my working desk in the study, I could probably drive straight in from the hall up to the desk without moving from the wheelchair. Thinking it through again I believe this will all work without too much difficulty and, as Lynne says, it would give me a great deal more freedom. When it comes to the time when my legs are not working at all and Barry our faithful driver, finds it too difficult to lift me up and down, in and out of his car, then we can engage the services of the specialist wheelchair taxi and I can probably drive the electric one straight into it, for example. when I want to go to golf club on Tuesdays. On balance then I believe Lynne and Mick, are right, I must keep it and use it. All I have to do now is to convince’ my lovely’!

Great excitement today. From my study chair I look out at our beautiful chestnut trees in the paddock and suddenly I saw three very beautiful, brown curly haired, double horned sheep, frisking their way passed the window. As the post and rail paddock fence is only around 20 feet away I naturally assumed they were the other side of it, until I suddenly realised that they were actually in the garden. I alerted ‘my lovely’ and Mick, who being a good Aussie was born on a farm and was well used a herding sheep. Between them they manage to get them back into the paddock and then locate and repair the hole in the tennis court fencing through which they had affected their escape.