All power to the chair!

After a timid start there's been no holding Wendy back these past few days as she gets more accustomed to driving her power wheel chair. All the family felt frustrated when we had such perfect weather last weekend but we simply couldn't persuade her to go outside. Early in the week, however, Rebecca and Richard backed me in tempting her to venture out the back door in the corridor between our tower block and the garage, then the next day Courtney Henderson, who fitted her for the chair and made last-minute fine-tuning adjustments, persuaded her to go out the ramp from the garage to the street. Once she has got used to driving out of doors there will be no holding her. But she loves the chair most of all because she can tilt it to the position that she finds the most comfortable -- as you can see in the photos in the post before this one. Now she is spending most of her waking hours in it.

Her chair is brand new, custom-built to her exact measurements, and is the latest and best example of the excellent service we have been getting from our health and medical care system. Diffidently, I raised with a couple of members of the team caring for her the question of priorities in allocating scarce and expensive equipment that I've discussed in earlier posts on this blog, and was emphatically told that setting priorities plays no part whatever in the process. We waited as long as we did simply because there's a great deal of work involved, and not enough skilled chair-builders in the business.

Another thing that happened this week is that I had a birthday, celebrated in a pretty low key manner this year but that's as it should be; there is nothing special about the transition from 83 to 84 years. Richard provided delicious salmon and all the trimmings to go with it, which made a pleasant change from my usual steak and two vegetables; and Rebecca produced a splendid little cake, the last remains of which still repose in the frig for me to savour over the weekend.