Nyxks Musings

I’ve watched many Day in the Life, A Day Wheelchair Challange, and other similarity-themed YouTube videos. Not a single one of them touches on how sore, painful, and hard it is to use a wheelchair that isn’t actually built for your specific frame/person. All the people who have done the challenge who were not disabled only talked about the challenges that they experience, not a single video talked about the after-effects of using the chair for however many hours, or how they felt physically afterward. I know such experience likely wasn’t filmed or if it was it was cut out of the experience as not being relevant to what the author was trying to show.

Which I do understand, but as a new chair user it would have been something that would have been helpful to hear about from others’ personal experiences and the like. I knew that I would be sore afterward, but I wasn’t expecting it to be at this level of discomfort and pain, not to mention fatigue.

Not a single video expressed how hard it is to push yourself along uneven pavement/ground, or how to keep yourself from running into the road on said uneven pavement – this is something that I have trying to figure out how to do and the strength it takes to just keep the chair rolling straight without it rolling into the road or the grass is more consistent strength then I actually was expecting it to take out of me.

Then take in the countdowns for the traffic lights, OMG that was very frustrating as I would start out as soon as the hand-turned in my favor to start rolling, and before I was even halfway across the countdown would be almost over leaving me still crossing when it changed! That was super frustrating, to say the least – big time since it was on a very busy street (Finch Ave). Add in that the road surfaces were very uneven and caught my front casters more than once almost tipping me out of my chair didn’t help matters.

Now I have used my chair for a few hours here and a few hours there, but Wednesday, May 18th, 2022 was my first actual day of using it fully outside in public, and I mean more than going to the mall or similar easy rolling surfaces. I had to get to my podiatrist appointment something that I normally would drive to, but since I currently don’t have a working vehicle and I’ve no timeline as to when I still have one, I did what needed to be done and took my chair out for a full spin.