Speed Bump #5

When I started this blog I said I would discover those situations in life that was not handicapped friendly.  Some of which I have encountered are within my own home.  I'd like to ask a question to start:  Who decided that bathroom doorways should be more narrow that regular doorways?  Shouldn't you have as much space as possible to get in to a very important room?  A wheelchair can't manuever it.  Neither can a walker.  So this is how I do it (at the moment).  I use a walker upstairs to get to the bathroom door where another walker is waiting for me, for the BIG TRANSFER.

But wait!  What's that on the floor in the doorway?  I never knew what a threshold was but I do now.  It's that an inch slab of ceramic tile that I have to get over.  Sometimes to my "dead" left foot it feels like it's more like a foot high.  So here is how I approach this speed bump.

I enter the master bedroom via the walker.  The bathroom is directly to my right.  I close the bedroom door half way so I can place the walker behind it and I am parallel to the bathroom doorway.  The bathroom walker is waiting.  I place my left hand on that walker, brace my left elbow on the doorframe, lift my left foot over the threshold (if I'm lucky), all the while holding the bedroom walker with my right hand.  The moment of transfer occurs when I lift my right foot into the bathroom while raising my weight from one walker to the other.  Whew! I made it!

While the whole process only takes a few moments, there are times that it feels like I just ran a marathon.  Dragging my left foot as I use the walker is exhausting enough but then to cross the Great Divide . . . No wonder I'm so tired.  Depends are starting to look better and better!  Just kidding.