Leg Spazz

My power-chair is driving me crazy. I have been spending, what feels like the entire day, struggling to keep my right foot on the stupid foot plate of this chair. For some reason my right foot tends to spasm from resting on my footplate to straight out. Usually my foot hangs down from my knee at about a 90 degree angle which is fine but often as I am cruising in my chair or even sitting at my desk—like right now, typing, the leg will spaz out and kind of drag me slight out of my chair. When the spasm occurs it is not a painful ordeal, unless ofcourse I am ‘cooking’ down the road and my extended leg,foot0 should hi something or worse get caught beneath a wheel or footplate, the spasm is just annoying and sometimes embarrassing. Getting my foot back onto the foot plate is often challenging too. I have to ‘break’ the spasm, get the leg to loosen so I can bend it back into a position I can put on the plate. I then must drag and lift the leg into position and with limited hand function and strength can be a real work out and if all this effort is not enough I must be careful, when I pull my foot up that I do not drag my heal over the forward edge of the foot plate and pull the shoe clean off my foot.

I firmly believe the problem is either the positioning of the foot plates or the cushion I sit on, or depth of the seat of my chair. This all has something to do with the way my legs hang off the seat and cushion of the chair. The guy who sold me the cushion is a physical therapist by training and should be able to see this kind of stuff and remedy the problem but the remedy has not happened as yet. Perhaps the problem is me—maybe my spasms are getting worse, this could happen—nothing surprises me anymore especially when it has to do with me and my body. But what if it was the cushion –what if the insurance had purchased the wrong cushion on the PT’s recommendation and the only way would be to replace the cushion meaning the company would have to “eat” it and I don’t see this wheelchair shop doing that.

This weekend I got stranded in my chair laying the back position. I had to call my son in law to help me transfer from my chair to my manual wheelchair but I called my salesguy who was able to talk us through the problem( which were some pressure plates on the chair, a safety feature of the chair to protect animal tails and children’s fingers from being smashed when the chair fold back up into its upright position. I really appreciated the working with me on this problem 8:30 on a Friday night—so I don’t want to bug the guy too much and save the crises calls for real crises and not just foot spasm crises which I can usually fix myself, independently and with just a little frustration. My next step is to get a large Velcro strap strapping up my legs—this solution will look stupid but the resulting comfort will be priceless….