I have another sewing post in the works and will probably publish it by the end of the week. First, though, I’ll break the promise I made to myself to take an indefinite pause from imposing mobility updates on my readership. This one is ripe for the sharing, and I’d be doing us all a disservice by keeping it to myself.
Over the past few months, my power wheelchair has suffered several injuries in addition to those I’ve documented in this blog. I do have some self-control! And when I say that it’s suffered, what I really mean is that I have. This chair has seriously been the bane of my existence while also being my saviour, and I constantly vacillate between being grateful for and cursing it. A prime example of the many ways it’s betrayed me? Almost immediately after its motors were replaced, it started making disconcerting noises and refusing to climb curb cuts that it would normally conquer with little issue. Though its wobbly clunking caused my anxiety to spike every time I went out, I was told that it was fine and thus foolishly drove an unsafe chair for weeks without knowing that it was a ticking time bomb. A little gaslighting and a whole lot of back and forth later, the problem was finally identified: to my moderate expense and great relief, all four casters were replaced, and my six-wheeled Judas returned from the shop driving smoothly. I naively hoped that I’d be safe for a while but nonetheless booked an end-of-season assessment and tune-up to minimize the chances of being left homebound this summer. In the meantime, I handled my chair with the neurotic care it demands of me.
It was especially disheartening, then, when the noises began anew. They were faint and sporadic enough at first that I could convince myself that they were the product of my overactive imagination (phantom murmurs?), but they noticeably worsened with each passing day. By that weekend, I started wondering if I should stay home rather than risk getting stranded in the wilds of Toronto. By last Monday, I was grateful that the service call I’d so wisely scheduled would take place the following day.
After dinner that night, my husband and I went on a junk-food/nail-polish run to the drugstore. As we browsed the aisles, he listened.
“That doesn’t sound good,” he observed, apparently concerned that I’d lost my hearing along with my sanity. “I don’t think you should go out again until it’s been checked out.” Further confirmation came from a well-meaning man we ran into in the lobby of our building who noticed the chair’s rumblings and decided to help diagnose the issue. “That isn’t a wheel noise,” he rather unhelpfully commented. “It might be the engine.”
Great.
I’m the first to admit that I have a history of experiencing free-floating anxiety that’s disproportionate to wherever it happens to land. That said, I’ve learned to trust my instincts when it comes to my wheelchair—that this is a situation, if one of the few, in which I can and should give heed to my anxious thoughts and take action based on them. Indeed, nearly every time I’ve suspected that there’s something wrong with my chair, there’s been something wrong wrong. The disconcerting noises clanging out like a symphony of kindergartners pounding on triangles and cymbals therefore made me suspect that I’d soon have my umpteenth forced hibernation of this calendar year. In any case, I was bracing myself: still hoping for the best but very much expecting the worst. Of course, I also took my chair out for a final drive in anticipation of being told that it was unfit for service, but what can you do. While I skew heavily in the direction of risk-aversion—I was the kid who refused to go down a waterslide until the ripe old age of twelve—I make calculated exceptions in the name of asserting my independence and getting fresh air. Besides, I needed diversion as I waited for the wheelchair technician to arrive.
I didn’t need to convince him that there was a problem.
“Yeah, that sounds bad,” he said after hearing and watching my chair doing its thing. “It’s the casters.”
Better than the engine, I thought. What a silver lining. I’d have to figure out how to tactfully communicate to Lobby Guy that he was wrong.
Not wanting to distract the tech or prove myself to be as weird and gawky as I am, I sat at my desk and stared at a blank Word document as he raised the chair on hoists and began a more thorough evaluation.
A minute or so later, I spied him removing one of the casters. Accepting that there was no use pretending to be occupied with important adult tasks, I closed my laptop.
“OK, this is weird.” He was poking at the caster. A bemused, or maybe amused, expression, had spread across his face.
“What is it?”
“Hair.”
I wheeled over to examine the small, fluffy pile that was accumulating on the floor as he proceeded with his methodical extraction. It was, yes, hair, and not a strand or two but rather short clumps of it. Upon closer inspection, I saw that it was of a relatively uniform length of around an inch or so, much shorter than my ponytailable locks, and most was the colour of the hair on my head save the odd tuft of blond here and there. For having just been in a wheel, it looked strangely as if it were freshly washed.
The tech cleaned the caster, put it back in, and moved to another. It, too, was full of hair, as were casters three and four. All said and done, there was a good half cup of it. I marvelled at the massive hairball, in equal parts amazed and horrified by my chair’s feat in producing it and spitting it up. (Please note that I’m not including the picture I took. I have been advised by people with more discretion than I possess that showing off one’s dead skin cells is gross.)
“Can’t say I’ve seen that before,” he said, “but that was definitely what was causing the sound.” He gave me some technical explanation that I forgot within five minutes. Sucked-in hair causing pressure, maybe? He then tested the batteries and a few other things to make sure there were no other glaring issues.
Once the chair was back on safe ground, I transferred to it and drove it around a bit. Sure enough, it was noticeably quieter. Not absolutely silent, which is fine—I’m not of the old-school “chairs should be seen but not heard” mindset—but enough of an improvement that I had to ask for reassurance that the problem was truly resolved a mere three or four times.
That the technician didn’t seem particularly curious as to why my month-old casters had been clogged with a doll-wig’s worth of tresses is perhaps indication that he’s seen some wild stuff in his years in his profession of choice. I, however, was racking my brain trying to figure it out.
He was packing up to leave, and I was running my fingers over my craniotomy ridge and thus through my hair as I absentmindedly do when I’m trying to spur my brain into action, when it came to me.
“Oh geez,” I said. “I got a haircut a few weeks ago. I must not have noticed that they hadn’t swept up and driven through the trimmings.”
That’s right: I jammed up my casters with hair garbage. It all made sense now—the uniformity, the length, the just-washed appearance, the interspersed blond (the woman seated next to me had just endured a dye job). At least I’d been pleased with the splurgey cut, which I’d justified to myself as being part of my ongoing bid to define a personal aesthetic. I was practically high with relief. There’s no better drug than being handed back one’s mobility.
So while I won’t reveal what a good haircut goes for these days, nor will I disclose how much I spent on the service call, I will reveal that the emotional cost of both is a week of wheelchair-related anxiety compensated by a good chuckle shared with a technician you see so often you’ve formed a context-specific friendship. And also by a story to repeat ad nauseam to anyone polite enough to tolerate listening to it—including you, I guess, so thanks.
De Morbo Sacro: Life and/with Epilepsy 