This has been a week of shocks.

It started out harmlessly enough: James had an appointment for a Procrit shot. We talked to Dr. Kongara and Bruce, and wondered if James needed a urinalysis. Based on what we told him, he didn't think so. He did say James' BUN number was very high, so to cut back the torsemide (diuretic) to one a day.

Alas, next day James was peeing very red, so we ate a good breakfast, packed a lunch, and went to Urgent Care. Providentially, it wasn't crowded, and we were in almost immediately. He did indeed have a UTI, and they gave him an IV bag of antibiotics and then a 10-day prescription for cephalexin and asked him to come back next week for a followup. They also took a CT scan of his back, which is still killing him—to get out of bed at night to use the bathroom he has to put the head of the bed up to help him—and they did indeed confirm that nothing was broken or torn. No painkillers offered this time; they just told him Tylenol and heat/ice.

On the way home, something frightening happened. You remember that I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had expressed concern about the chair lift on the back of the truck, that it wasn't holding the chair on properly? And then we took it to Mobility Works and paid $165 for a "tune up" in which it was checked out and lubricated and they recalibrated it with the chair and they said it was fine?

When we left Kaiser we put the chair up on the lift and I gave a puzzled little look once it was up because there was still a gap a finger's width wide between the end of the bar and the chair. But we were tired after everything at Urgent Care and just drove home, through the park, downtown Marietta, and about 45 mph at least down South Cobb Drive. James turned down side streets, and we were waiting for the light at Windy Hill when I noticed the little blue flag at the back of the chair was looking awfully low. I figured it was just the angle we were at.

The light changed and when James put the truck into drive we heard a funny little jolting sound. We crossed Windy Hill, finished going down Olive Springs, made the sharp right turn onto Smyrna Powder Springs, stopped at the stop sign, then did the left turn into Trellis Oaks.

As we turned left into the driveway, something scraped the concrete.

James came to a stop, I jumped out of the truck, and nearly had hysterics. The base of the lift was almost at a 45-degree angle and his $8,000 power chair was being held on it by the barely two-inch tall outer rim of the base of the lift and the inner edge of the crossbar that usually extends across the seat!!!!! The two welds that fasten the inner edge of either side of the base to the vertical part of the lift were both cracked completely in half--looked like metal fatigue. At least one of the cracks had rust inside it--which means I was right all along about it not clamping properly when I first noticed it at Costco.

I think I need to go light a candle somewhere to thank God the freaking chair didn't fall off, get damaged, and worst of all, maybe cause an accident with the car behind us. Can you imagine if it had come bouncing off in the middle of South Cobb Drive? Or downtown?????

I left a hysterical message on Mobility Works' message machine and the next day I followed James and the truck to get it examined and drove home.

Mobility Works had that bottom platform in stock and will replace it for a nice fat $1400. Just wondering why it cracked in the first place. It was sold to us as supporting this wheelchair.

So we were in need of a distraction and never got it, as the internet crashed Saturday afternoon and never came back until Sunday night. We watched DVDs for the duration. We will never put our eggs all into that streaming basket; it's too easy to take down.

Labels: accidents, events, health, internet, sickness

----------------------------------------------------------------
. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:57:00 PM

Comments: Post a Comment