January 20, 2009

Mobility

For a very long time my wife and I tried to convince my mother to let us get a wheel chair for her.  She has been ill for a very long time.  She is on oxygen 24/7 and cannot walk more than about twenty feet without having to stop and catch her breath.  My wife used to take her to run errands when we lived near her (we moved away a while ago) and she would tell me how hard it was for my mother to run the errands, and how many stores did not have scooters or wheel chairs available for their customers.  And then there have been times we wanted to take her to a show of some kind and there were no wheel chairs available there, either. 

Sometimes we managed to borrow a wheelchair from a local hospital that my sister worked at to take my mother to a show, but those were not the kind that could easily fit into a car trunk and that was a pain in the neck!  Finally my mother decided to look into buying one of those electric scooters, and we are all very pleased with how that has increased her ability to get around.  Her insurance paid for it all, and now she can go just about anywhere she wants to go!

Hope the traffic isn’t too bad

Filed under: Family,General Living,Health,Local — Copa @ 4:57 am

I have an appointment this morning at 8:30 at a doctor’s office in Northern VA today.  I’ve seen this doctor before and it normally takes about 90 minutes to drive there from where I live, but with rush hour traffic my wife normally says we should plan on an extra 30 minutes to give us extra time in case there is a traffic jam.  With the extra traffic we think is going to happen this morning because of the Inauguration, we are going to leave even earlier – we’re going to leave at 6am to get to an 8:30am appointment.  Isn’t it awful that it takes that long to get to a qualified doctor?  We’ve tried local doctors that claim to have the expertise but they don’t seem to have the expertise we need, which is discouraging.  I guess I should be grateful that I don’t have a condition that requires this type of travel on a weekly basis!  I know that there are people that DO have to travel even further for that for medical help.  That would get real old real fast.