Trust Issues

I’m trying to stay upbeat and believing in my new powerchair but this is a challenge. I think I have mentioned the issue once before of the powerchair freezing the tilt mode. I was hoping against hope that this was a fluke, something which just happened. But now the frequency of the problem seems to becoming more and more frequent which is not good.

Thursday at the office, the day of my last broadcast I was tilting and the chair froze. What I have been ding is waiting a few minutes and the chair usually would begin operating again but it did not do begin to operate even after ten minutes. I eventually called the shop but when I jut as I got the tech on the phone mysteriously the chair began operating. I should have just left the chair in the up position but like the idiot I am-- I immediately launched into another tilt and this tilt stuck( ninety minutes before the broadcast). No matter what we did the chair would not function. The tilt function has an override feature which will not allow the chair to move forward or any direction for that matter. For some magical reason, about 45 minutes to broadcast the chair started operating and continued operating perfectly the remainder of the day. When the broadcast was done I booked back to my office and called the shop and scheduled an appointment for the following day. Mathew, the tech I talked with, said the problem was most likely small and should be easy to isolate and fix.

So yesterday, Friday, my day off, the first day of my weekend I am up ready to go so as soon as I think I can get way with it I head to Magic Rest, I take my van because I had a number of things to do. I ran into Josh, the head tech who had be cycle through my tilt function ad luckily the chair seized. Josh tinkered. There are two “sensor strips or pads” and these strip are pretty sensitive. If there is something on the pads the chair stops working, like child’s hands, tails and what ever else might land there. If the cover of the pads become ajar this can cause the problem too. Josh did some adjusting and the seat seemed to work. Josh did leave me this the caveat that if the problem continued then make an appointment and the tech’s would do an in depth search of th chair and it’s sytems to find out what the real problem is. This all seemed to make sense to me and I am easy so I was out and finished my errands and went on home. I decided to tilt back as soon as I got squared away in the house. I went all the way back and sure enough the seat froze. The whole chair froze, of course, and stayed that way for at least a half hour. It was late in the day and I finally for the chair to begin working a little so I would cycle the chair back and forward. Some times the chair would almost come back to the corrected seated position.

Finally, I got the seat to almost to where it should be but the seat was don enough I could drive my chair to where I needed to go and I was able to transfer back to my manual wheelchair . In the safety of my manual wheelchair I messed with the power chair, specifically the power strips and the seat started working correctly. Today I have not had any problems. So hopefully its fixed but I will still take the chair in for an inspection. But the issue of trust is what’s on the line—you gotta trust your chair just like you gotta trust you car or your pharmacist—its all trust.