As an adolescent and teenager, I went through a fair number of wheelchairs. On the downside, my need for a new wheelchair almost every school year was fueled out of necessity, where inferior designs simply didn’t withstand my active use, breaking frames, burning through motors, and such. On the upside, I grew up in an era when both power and manual mobility technology was evolving very quickly, where if you wished to use the most liberating technology, you had to get a new wheelchair every two years.
Among my peers, I was fortunate in that I had a small medical trust fund – and, in my teen years, an increasing connection to the wheelchair industry – that provided me the resources to obtain the latest mobility technology. Nevertheless, my good fortune didn’t seem to make selecting new wheelchairs any easier, as I was always haunted by the wheelchair choices that I had to make, where there were always two chairs that so tugged at my passions, but I had to choose just one. There was the decision between the Power and Silent Premiers by E&J, where the Silent had the horizontal motors, with the controller under the seat, giving it the sportiest look around – but I went with the Power Premier because it could be better secured on the school bus. Then, there was choosing between the Fortress 655 and the E&J Explorer, where the Explorer had better marketing, with the brochure showing it on a bed of gravel, looking unstoppable – but I chose the Fortress because it was supposed to have better reliability. And, then, there was the toss between an E&J Power Premier with 21st-Century conversion kit or the original big-wheel Invacare Arrow, which was the fastest production powerchair – I chose the E&J and 21st-Century kit because it was chain drive, and I wanted a chair that rumbled like a motorcycle. And, on the manual side, the decisions were no easier, with choices between Quickie or Quadra; Liberation Concepts or Jerry Smith; Magic in Motion or Top End; Etac or Kuschall? And, so, I built a legacy of mobility decisions – punctuated with pained choices.
Throughout those agonizing decisions, what I didn’t realize was that my difficulty in choosing one mobility product over another ultimately had very little to do with comparing the specifications of two wheelchairs. In actuality, my difficulty in choosing one wheelchair over another came out of my desire for utmost mobility, where the possibilities of every new wheelchair seemed so endless that choosing one surely left some sort of unrealized potential on the table by not choosing the other.
Interestingly, my fears never proved true, where every wheelchair that I chose dramatically increased my mobility, improving my life in big and small ways alike – in that way, my choice was always two of the same.
What I’ve realized is that meaningful mobility doesn’t come from agonized, remorseful decisions. Rather, meaningful mobility stems from the resolute decisions that we make, and living life to the fullest with the wheelchairs that we have.
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