Mum has new wheels!

Mum has been getting more wobbly and much faster to tire in the last few weeks so Sister 2 took the initiative and ordered a wheelchair.  Which got lost in transit so she ordered another.  And this Tuesday was the first time it was dry enough for an expedition, and I was very excited.  Party because I wouldn’t have the worry of will we / wont we get back from the park without me having to piggy back Mum and partly because if she enjoyed it, it opens up a whole heap of places (and not really just that – right now she can only manage one shop in town.  With a chair she can be taken  to every shop in Bumpkinsville should she want.)

So I had great hopes. Although I should have probably recognised my wheelchair limitations after the incident at the hospital the other week…  Now I know:

• Not all wheelchairs have a brake that you can put on and leave on.  This makes it slightly tricky to get a wobbly person sitting in it unless it’s backed up against a wall or you are ready to do an impressive amount of contortions to lower them in while simultaneously stopping the chair from rolling backwards
• You do not attempt to push a wheelchair with a cocker spaniel attached to one of the handles with an extendable lead on a road with no pavements (luckily I took the other lead too which worked great…on the way back)
• Even roads that look flat are curve-y at the edges
• Its really easy to steer a wheelchair into the curve-y edged bit
• It is less easy to steer a wheel chair out of the curve-y edged bit
• It is practically impossible to open a gate on a spring and push a wheelchair through it before it pings back on you
• It is very possible to get wheel chair wheels stuck in mud
• It is surprisingly hard to extract wheelchair wheels from mud when the wheelchair contains a Mummy W.

BUT:

Percy worked out how to make this into a ball throwing opportunity by dropping the ball directly in Mum’s lap:

AND:

Mum mostly liked the expedition!  And when I took her to meet a friend for lunch, the friend was singing the praises of wheelchairs and mobility scooters as they gave her late husband so much freedom (while the theory of a mobility scooter is great; I’m not sure anyone is that brave when it comes to Mum), so she got a bit more enthusiastic then too.

So we had that success.

And we had another in the shape of Jelly Drops:

Mum is less than brilliant at drinking fluids however often she is reminded / asked / given a full glass of something and Sister 1 thinks that it could be contributing her current levels of confusion. Jelly drops are recommended for exactly this circumstance by the Alzheimers Society so we got her some and (Great Floof!), she seems to like them – and it was a lot easier to get her to eat three while I was there than it would have been to get three glasses of water down her.  So we’ll see if regularly having them makes any difference.

And after the sweets, a shower, a hair wash and dry, and a spin in the new wheels, Mum went for lunch with a friend she went to school with while I went to Tesco.  And I think it’s safe to say that was probably enough for one day (for both of us, if we’re being honest 😉).  We got home and she fell asleep on the sofa in minutes.

When I left she work up briefly and asked ‘You wont be long, will you?’.

No, Mummy W; I’ll be back next week for another spin in the chair (and the start of a secret plan that we’ve put in place.)

And here’s a Tuesday TV for you.  I particularly liked Mum’s words of Wisdom this week 😉