My wife has been going a little crazy from the lack of mobility imposed on her by her injuries. Just to get her out of the house, I drove her to the mall the other day, and wheeled her around in her wheelchair. The mall has two floors, so we had to use the elevator.
When I got into the elevator, I saw a control panel that looked like this:
This kind of thing bothers me terribly. There's only one possible place for the elevator to go, so why are there two floor buttons? I realize that elevators aren’t intelligent, but I'm sure they know which floor they're on.
In my opinion, the elevator control panel should look like this:
The GO button tells the elevator to go to the next floor, whichever that might be. There’s no need for the “close door” button, because pushing the GO button closes the doors.
There are approximately 170,000 commercial buildings being constructed in the United States every year. I estimate that about half of those are 2-story buildings. If the elevator industry uses my improved design, eliminating two buttons, they’ll probably save at least $2.50 per installation. I would expect a Finder’s Fee of 1%, which means the elevator industry will owe me $2,125 by Christmas.
My wife is going slowly insane as a result of her enforced inactivity. However, this same lack of activity has enabled her to indulge daily in one of her greatest weekend pleasures: sleeping late. My daughter shares this particular genetic abnormality. Typically, I don’t sleep late. I get up on weekends around 7:30 and tiptoe around the house, forbidden from making any sound until the two of them stagger out of bed around 11:30.
But a month of sleeping late and vegetating in front of the TV are starting to wear on her. This week, she told me she wanted to go to the beach on Saturday. I started naming beaches with boardwalks or piers, but she told me in no uncertain terms that she doesn’t want to go TO the beach, she wants to go ON the beach.
I immediately pointed out that wheelchairs won’t roll in sand. But she is desperate, so we decided to go to Daytona Beach, where the sand is hard-packed, and you can drive a car on the beach. This may make it possible to wrestle her down to the water’s edge, although it will be tempting to leave her there as the tide comes in.
So when Saturday arrived, I got up at 7:30 and waited until 11:00 for the two of them to slide out of bed. By the time we got on the road, it was already well into the afternoon. Halfway to Daytona, we realized that we had forgotten to bring two important items: A beach chair (my wife hates sitting in the wheelchair), and the digital camera. As it turned out, I would regret these oversights.
My wife said, “It’s OK. When we get to Daytona Beach, we can stop in one of those beach shops and pick up another beach chair. You can’t have too many beach chairs.”
I didn’t respond to this, but of course you can have too many beach chairs. We’ve already got too many damn beach chairs, which are supposed to fold up into compact, flat shapes, but never do. It’s like trying to stuff a live flamingo into a suitcase.
So we have a shelf in our garage devoted to the storage of beach chairs, which are jammed in at awkward angles, most of which won't be used in my lifetime. It’s like we’re planning some huge luau that will never happen.
We stopped at the first beach shop, and I helped my wife out of the car, into her wheelchair, and then into the shop, where we found a pathetically small display of uncomfortable, cheaply-made beach chairs leaning against a wall. Of course, we didn’t want just ANY beach chair. We wanted one that will be comfortable for my wife.
“It’s off-season,” the clerk told us. “We’ll have more in the summer.”
The story was exactly the same at the next beach shop, and the next. Eventually, I stopped taking my wife out of the car, I’d just leave the engine running, dash in, find no beach chairs, and dash out. Finally, we stopped at a drugstore and found an enormous selection of beach chairs. Of course, we disagreed on which one would suit our needs, but my wife had the final say. So we bought one that doesn’t fold flat, and will be an ongoing storage problem in the years to come.
By the time we got to the beach, it was already 4:00, and the beach access gates had a sign that clearly informed us that the beach closes at sunset. This time of year, sunset occurs at 5:45, which meant we’d have about an hour and a half before the beach patrol guys would kick us out.
For those of you who have never been to Daytona Beach, the beach slopes very gradually to the water, and is made up of very fine sand, which is packed quite hard below the high-tide line. You can drive on it easily. But above the high-tide line, it gets all fluffy and soft, and if you’re driving a minivan, you’ll get stuck. We were driving a minivan. We got stuck.
I was able to rock it out, using my Boston snow-driving skills, turned the car around and got stuck again. Eventually, I was able to park in such a way that we could get my wife out of the car and I could drag her wheelchair down to the ocean’s edge.
Despite the frustration and effort needed to get her there, the experience was rather pleasant. The temperature was perfect. People of every description walked, biked or jogged past us, seagulls fought each other for Pringles we had brought, and at one point, a wedding party from one of the high-rise condos came down to the beach for photos.
But the best part of the afternoon began when my wife noticed a small rainstorm approaching the shore. We began to make friendly wagers on whether it was headed towards us, or would run south of our location. As it drew closer, and the sun sank lower in the sky, a rainbow suddenly appeared, but it was like no rainbow I’ve ever seen. Instead of materializing slowly in the typical arch shape, it grew out of the sea. It began as a glow on the horizon, then rose slowly out of the water like a broken (and gaily-decorated) Grecian column. It was intensely bright, glowing like neon. It grew higher and higher, arching as it went, until it was almost half complete.
At that point, the beach patrol came by and announced that it was time to leave, so I began packing my wife into the car. As I did so, we continued watching the rainbow phenomenon, which grew longer and longer, arching over the ocean. The moment we got everything packed away and started the car, the rainbow completed its arch, and it began to rain. So we drove home marveling at the sight we had witnessed, and lamenting the fact that we didn’t have a camera to record it.
My wife thoughtfully fell through the garage ceiling just before I was scheduled for a nice, restful 13-day vacation. With all the doctor visits, home care arrangements and wheelchair handling, I didn’t get much rest. But of course, the goal was to get my wife on the healing path, so that she wouldn’t require surgery. Surgery would mean nuts and bolts and pins and plates holding her bones together, and a much longer recovery period.
Yesterday was the day where the doctor would tell us whether surgery would be necessary, and we had been looking forward to it with nervous anticipation.
I woke up at 5:30 to get my daughter ready for school. Because there is a limited supply of school busses, the school districts use them six times every day. The first trip is to get high-school kids to school. The second trip is to get middle-school kids to school. The third trip is to get elementary school kids to school. The process is repeated in reverse later in the day to get kids home. Anyone who has lived with a teenager (or anyone who has actually been a teenager) will tell you that this is completely the opposite of how it should work. Teenagers need their sleep, and are capable of horrible acts of violence against their well-meaning parents, who have to face them and fix them breakfast at that unreasonable hour.
Nonetheless, I was up much earlier than I like, after 13 days of sleeping late. Because I knew I would be up early, I scheduled a dentist appointment that morning at 7:00. I arrived, not yet fully awake, and was ushered into a room containing one of those electrically-operated chairs that can be configured to thousands of positions, none of which are comfortable. I think the CIA uses them for waterboarding.
The dental assistant was new, a woman about my age with a thick accent. I asked her where she was from, and she said, “Poland.”
I said, “Oh that’s interesting. What part of Poland?”
“Southern Poland,” she replied. I should have sensed that she was evading my question.
“Yes, but which city?” I asked.
“Auschwitz.”
I swear I had no idea there was a city where the famous Nazi death camp was located. I just assumed it was out in the countryside somewhere, to provide privacy for the atrocities that would be committed by members of the German Master Race. Where I live, school children are often taken on field trips to the clean, charming theme parks for which the city of Orlando is famous. I didn’t ask the dental assistant where school children in Poland go on their field trips.
I spent the next few minutes struggling to make light conversation, until the dentist arrived to jam a needle into my jaw, injecting what felt like a quart of burning Novocain. Frankly, I prefer a cup of coffee at that hour of the morning.
An hour later, slack-jawed and drooling, I drove home to pick up my wife, who had an appointment at her school to meet with her boss and clean up some paperwork. While we were in her office, a little boy from third grade was ushered in with his teacher. The teacher said, “Josh has something to tell you.”
Josh, looking very uncomfortable, said, “I think I’m in danger.”
My wife asked him what he meant, and he said, “Because bad men might find out that I know the secret code.”
At my wife’s school, there are electronic locks on all the exterior doors, and teachers who take kids out to recess must enter a numeric code to open the doors to re-enter the building. Josh’s teacher explained that he had shown intense curiosity about the code all year, and had been shoulder-surfing to try and learn it. Eventually, he succeeded. His teacher found him telling other students about it, and she had to explain to him why the code was a secret. Now she needed the administration to change the code, and she wanted Josh to know what pain in the ass he had caused. In about 10 years, look for a kid named Josh to be arrested for hacking into the Pentagon launch-control computers.
Finally, we headed off to my wife’s doctor appointment. They took some X-rays, and the doctor peeked at them briefly. I don’t know about you, but I always want doctors to show more interest in my X-rays than they do. It’s the same with auto mechanics. They are professionals, and they’ve seen so many broken bones and leaky head gaskets that they can identify them with just a casual glance. So it always looks as though they’re not paying attention, and might miss something.
He quickly spun around and said, “Everything looks good. No surgery.” He told us that my wife needs to stay off the ankle for 4 more weeks and she can then begin to hobble around. The shoulder will take a little longer, and she’ll need rehab, but probably just what they call “at home” rehab, where she does some exercises on her own time. She’s relieved to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Personally, I’m relieved to be back at work.
On Sunday, Christmas Eve morning around 7:00 am, we got into the car for our trip to Atlanta. This was preceded by some agonizing over which car to take. My wife found the sedan provided a comfortable ride, but was difficult to enter and exit. The van was easy for her to get in and out, but the seating was less comfortable. Because I have a pretty good eye for 3-dimensional puzzles, I made the decision to take the van, because we had to take a gigantic pile of stuff with us, including the wheelchair, the commode, the office chair and our suitcases – plus we would be bringing our daughter and her suitcases back with us.
Once we got on the road, the comfort issue seemed to vanish.
The drive was brisk and easy, because anyone who was traveling that weekend had left on Saturday. In Georgia, I was puzzled by the roadside fences lining I-75. Typically, these were 4-inch steel mesh with metal poles. But every hundred feet or so, the metal poles were replaced by wood, with crossbeams, forming a kind of double “H” shape:
This is the kind of thing that drives me crazy. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble and expense, creating thousands of these wooden structures along the highway, and yet I could not figure out their purpose. Were they a kind of stile, enabling humans to clamber over the fence in emergencies? They did not appear to have hinges, but possibly they were gates, enabling firefighting equipment to access woods and fields from the highway. So I called the Georgia Department of Transportation and was only transferred three times by confused, irritable office workers until I got the answer, provided by one of the GDOT engineers. Drop me a line if you want to know.
In Atlanta, we stayed at the home of my wife’s aunt, a delightful, warm woman. She had bought us tickets to the Atlanta Aquarium, billed as the largest in the world. She said, “It’s Christmas day, so there shouldn’t be many people there.”
Unfortunately, she was wrong. The place was mobbed. A sign directed people into two lines of Disney-style switchbacks: “Previous Reservations” and “Purchase Tickets.” We got into the “Previous Reservations” line, which meandered around slowly in a freezing drizzle. Then, for reasons that can only be explained by the geniuses running the place, the two lines merged, forcing wet, shivering families to fight for a place in line.
Once inside, we discovered that wheelchairs are not respected by people who are not confined to them. When we were waiting for an opportunity to see a display, I had to leave about a foot between the wheelchair and the heels of the person in front of us, or they might back up, trip and fall into my wife’s lap. But once you leave that gap, someone will step into it as though the wheelchair doesn’t exist. My wife found the umbrella was an effective tool for defending her personal space.
The displays were in some cases breathtaking, clearly on a par with the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The Atlanta Aquarium has an enormous tank holding FOUR Whale Sharks, the world’s largest fish. Other tanks held Beluga Whales, Sea Otters, Sea Lions, coral reef fish, freshwater fish and jellyfish.
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It was chilly in Atlanta, which sits on that boundary between the cold-weather northern states and the mild south. So they get a chilly winter, and on rare occasions, snow. My wife’s aunt told me that her neighbor actually bought a snow-making machine, so that they could cover the yard with artificial snow on cold nights and their kids could go sledding.
My wife’s aunt was dog-sitting for her son’s dog, Blossom. Blossom likes to pre-sanitize the dinner dishes by licking them in the dishwasher before they’re washed, removing any last traces of sticky egg yolk or smears of grease.
When we left on Wednesday, traffic was bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go all the way to Macon. It took us 2 hours just to drive to the outskirts of Atlanta. Fortunately, the roads opened up and we made good time the rest of the way, but it was a long time in the car and we’re all grateful to be home.
On Sunday, my wife and I managed to sleep away most of the morning. Her recent injury made it hard for her to get comfortable in bed, so there was a lot of fussing with pillows. Eventually, the Percoset kicked in and she slept well.
Because her ankle is broken, she can’t walk. Because her shoulder is broken, she can’t use crutches. Sooner or later, she was going to have to visit the bathroom, so she sent me off to her school to borrow a wheelchair from the clinic. By the time I got home with it, she was just about ready to burst.
So she painfully elevated herself from the bed, swung around and gingerly settled into it for the short ride. We approached the bathroom door and discovered something ugly about Florida building codes. It seems that normal household doors are 30 inches wide, which accommodates most sizes of people and a typical wheelchair, which is 26 inches wide. However, in Florida, bathroom doors need only be 24 inches wide. This makes them a tight squeeze for extra-large people and an impossible barricade for wheelchairs.
A normal door.
A narrow bathroom door.
We panicked, but eventually came up with a workable strategy. It seems that an ordinary desk chair with casters on the legs can fit through a 24-inch door. My wife sits in the chair, and I pull her through the bathroom door. She’s able to use the bathroom and then I pull her back out. Unfortunately, the lush pile carpeting that feels so delightful on bare feet drags at the chair casters in such a way that I must strain to move her. She helps by pushing with her good foot, but it’s still an effort. It’s too late for me to run for Governor in 2006, but just wait. I’m going to have those building codes changed, and I’m sure I’ll have a lot of support from the vast, wheelchair-bound elderly constituency in Florida.
The bathroom express.
We called the orthopedic surgeon first thing this morning and after waiting on hold, we were told his first appointment was tomorrow. My wife was outraged, demanding to know how they could send someone home from the emergency room with broken bones and expect them to wait 2 days for treatment. I printed out a list of orthopedic surgeons on her health plan, and she found one who agreed to see her today, at 11:00 in Orange City, which is about an hour’s drive. She told me this proudly, and I looked at the clock, noticing that it was 10:30, and we still had to swing by the hospital to pick up her X-rays. She said, “So we’ll be late. So what?” This is a fundamental difference between my wife and I, one that will never be resolved.
The orthopedic surgeon turned out to be a nice guy, who gave my wife one of those high-tech space boots that has Air Jordan pumps on either side. He told her sternly, “Don’t put any weight on it for at least 2 weeks and we’ll see how it’s doing. If you’re not careful, I’ll have to put plates and screws into it.” As for the shoulder, he told her that there’s no way to immobilize it. She has to keep it in a sling and it will either heal or it won’t. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible keep from bumping it or jarring it unless she takes a lot more Percoset and just drools in bed for the next month.
He gave us a prescription for a wheelchair and a bedside commode (so that she won’t have to make the bathroom trip by herself if I’m not there). And more Percoset, of course.
The wheelchair prescription turned out to be something of a joke, though. He prescribed a very special kind of wheelchair, with a unique axle enabling it to be operated by someone with the use of only one arm. Do you know what car salesmen do when they’re so hideous and incompetent that they can’t even sell cars? They sell wheelchairs. I made a couple of calls and was told that those wheelchairs are very expensive, have to be specially-ordered, and will take 6 to 8 weeks to arrive. Which means that by the time we got it, my wife won’t need it.
I found a place that sells bedside commodes, but they want $95 for them, and insurance won’t pay for them. So I went to Wal-Mart and picked up a camping toilet for $22. Call me cheap if you must, but she’ll thank me when she has to use it.
