My brother Ted is the best problem-solver I know. This is because he’s a master at creative thinking, thinking  of alternatives. I couldn’t turn my wrist one way in order to plug in my wheelchair charger, so he taped a tongue depressor onto the cord to enable my turning it with my right, more agile hand. It doesn’t look all that neat and tidy, but it gets the job done. Who woulda thunk it? This is nothing, however, relatively speaking.

I did decorate the handles Ted made for a few of my wastebaskets though. I have a lot of pink in my house, so I braided a pink pipe cleaner around a circular pull for one of them. The other two are plain old hangers bent upwards to make them tall and easy to reach without bending over. Ted braided a silver pipe cleaner around one of them for me, and I started painting the wastebasket too to make it ‘pretty’ (it holds garbage–it can’t really be pretty, but I tried.)

More contraptions that Ted conjured up for  my independent living include counter and table cut-outs for ease in getting up close, and sawed-down legs of my desk so that I could fit under it and not have to raise my arms up to type. But the invention that catches the most attention is my footrest gadgets.

These Ted devised basically out of bicycle cables attached to each footrest with a hose clamp and a brass ring on the end to enable me to pull the foot pedals up in order to stand or do whatever I need to do. Additional wires are strung through holes in each foot pedal. Since they have a ring on the end, I can get them out of the way if I need to without having to bend over much.

Before I acquired my new wheelchair with a built-in tilt mechanism, Ted made a slope for me with three triangular boards under my wheelchair cushion. It did its job. My knees and posture thanked him.

Ted’s most recent contraption is an umbrella holder for my wheelchair. A board spread from armrest to armrest secures a tube for the umbrella stick and holds the umbrella over and in front of me as I drive. This is similar to another contraption for my amplifier that I used to use at work. The speaker was harnessed on a rod  of the wheelchair behind my shoulder; the amplifier was a headset that could be worn with the microphone placed right in front of my lips. Carrying my amplifier around with me was crucial in the noisy hustle and bustle of the college where I worked.

My dear old brother does get carried away sometimes though, and I teased him once. I have lost my remote for my automatic bed in my sleep several times and had to have my other brother or my sister come and help me get up out of bed in the morning. In order to spare them from having to leave work and to maintain my own independence, I asked Ted for help in solving the problem. I had thought of the simple solution of a rubber band around my hand and remote, but I wanted to make sure Ted didn’t have better ideas. He didn’t, but he said the rubber band idea was too unreliable. Well, I have been using this solution for about a year now, and he was right: it’s not 100% foolproof, but definitely more often than not, this simple solution of a rubber band has saved the day. It was just not fancy enough for Ted.

Addendum:

Interestingly enough, I recently found myself  guilty of the same overly-zealous inclinations! While he was away on vacation, I designed my own footrest gadgets, to put them down from their ‘up’ position, with the intention of getting a head start on my idea while he was away. Well, when he returned, I ran my design idea by him, because I’m just not a mechanical person. Well, to make a long story short, he demonstrated for me, because the footrests have a round hole on their bottoms, that a simple dowel, not even attached to anything, would do the trick without my having to bend over much. (Yah, yah, yah; tease away.)