I had a slight problem with my chair last week. One of the back wheels got jammed. I have to take the wheels off to be able to get it in the car but one of them would not budge. Fortunately on the day this first became a problem Emma was with me. She took the good wheel off and put the remaining one-wheeled chair on to the back seat of the car. But this was not a sustainable solution going forward. I have to be able to go out in the car on my own and as I’ve explained to you many times I don’t go out by myself on the off chance that a passer by will help me.
So I had to call Rosscare. They are the company charged with maintaining NHS wheelchairs. They are woefully named. Rosscare do not care. They should be called Rosscouldn’tgiveafuck. It is no exaggeration to say that on the last five occasions I have needed them to come out to help me they have turned up without the right parts. The last mechanic who visited me said he was almost certainly quitting the job because he was so sick of going to people’s houses only to find that they need something entirely different than what he has been told to provide. If you phoned Rosscare asking for a new set of tyres for your chair they would be just as likely to bring you a a basket full of fruit. Which would all have gone bad by the time it got to you.
So I speak to them as rarely as possible. But there was no way around it this time. Hopes of an unlikely success were raised when they said they could visit me at my workplace on the day that I rang them. It would have been easier to do it on a day when I was working from home but it couldn’t wait. Still, to be fair to them they were there within the hour. It was the last thing they got right for two days.
There were two of them when they arrived. That’s unusual. Normally they only spare you one mechanic. I met them just by reception and jumped out of the offending chair on to a spare seat. One of those which swivel, which didn’t help. After my transplant it took me a month and a half to learn how to transfer on to chairs that don’t move. I’m still not great at it. It takes a little while. Not only that but my shoes inevitably fall off during the transfer. I can’t get shoes to fit at the moment. When I was in the hospital they insisted I wear their compression stockings. Since then I have developed biff feet, swollen to absurd proportions. I have the feet of a grossly overweight 80 year-old woman.
I make it on to the seat and the pair set about examining my chair. They look genuinely surprised when they can’t get the wheel off. As if I’ve either made the whole thing up to troll them or I’m so useless that I just can’t do it myself. They up the intensity a bit, pulling harder at the wheel, giving it a bit of a kicking. At no point do they go back to the van to get any tools which might help them complete their mission. But this is Rosscare. They’ve probably been told I have a completely different problem. I bet there is a basket of darkening fruit in the van.
This goes on for about 10 minutes during which there is no movement. Just like it was yesterday my wheel is about as likely to move as Blackadder’s Frenchman who lives next door to a brothel. Finally, the slightly less shambolic of the two takes the initiative and makes a call to his boss. I only hear one end of the conversation but it doesn’t sound all that promising. My legendary ability to see the worst is justified this time. Whoever he has just spoken too - colleague, manager, CEO off Rosscare, bloke who runs the fruit stall - has told him that his task is impossible. The chair will have to be taken into the workshop and I am about to hear the words that every wheelchair user fears most. Loan chair.
Wheelchairs aren’t one size fits all. They are not johnnies. The chances of the company that can’t provide a set of tyres in five attempts finding a suitable chair for my needs are microscopic. But what choice do I have? I reluctantly agree, naively hoping that they’ll provide something which will at least be good enough to get me around the house. I might have to stay in the house for a few days but with home working still A Thing I’m confident I can muddle through. The mechanics leave with parting apologies and I go back to the office and wait for a call with the details.
I’m informed that they will not be able to get back out that day (Friday) but that they will come to my home on Sunday with the loan chair. I’ll just have to get through Saturday without going out in the car but that is not much of a hardship these days. Saturdays are for glueing myself to the sofa watching Netflix and Sky Sports. If I’m going out in the car on a Saturday then either I won’t be back the same day or something has gone drastically wrong.
Sunday morning comes. It’s standard when you are expecting a visit from Rosscare that they do not tell you exactly when that will be. Sometimes they will let you know whether it will be in the morning or the afternoon but nothing more specific than that. On this day I haven’t even been told that much. Fortunate then that I don’t really like to stay in bed on days when I’m not working so I’m up and about by 8.30am. That’s about as early as they could possibly arrive. I cannot envisage such a half arsed operation being on it any earlier than that. Not that I blame them for that. I’ve never worked a minute I didn’t have to. And it was a Sunday.
Around 11.00 that morning another hapless victim mechanic shows up at my door. I go out and take a look at my loan chair. My expectations were low but I am still blown away by the sheer unsuitability of this contraption that sits on my ramp. The mechanic holds on to it proudly, smiling at me as if it has solved all my problems.
His smiley pride turns to confusion when I inform him that the loan chair is unusable. I know that as soon as I clap eyes on it because it’s folded up. I haven’t used a chair with a seat that folds since Leslie Crowther and Matthew Kelly were prime time Saturday night TV stars. It’s clearly a relic that should be in a museum and not anywhere near my arse. It’s also completely square. And absolutely massive. I bet it weighs 12 times what my own chair weighs.
On the phone they had given it a dynamic sounding, sporty name. They had warned me that it was the only chair they had but through my natural skepticism the name had been enough to persuade me that I’d at least be able to use it to go to the bathroom. But it was just too big. It was as big as the Millennium Falcon. It had trap doors, secret passages and prison quarters. If I tried to push that thing I would have looked like Jimmy Krankie sitting on The Iron Throne.
We were running out of options. To his credit the mechanic accepted my dismissal of the Millennium Falcon with good grace. I think he inwardly agreed with me that Rosscare were offering the most farcical replacement since the last change of Prime Minister. He offered to have another go at removing the troublesome wheel from my own chair. I explained to him what the other mechanics had said about it being an impossible job without taking the chair in. He smiled and nodded with a trace of sarcasm which suggested he had little faith in what the other mechanics or the people running Rosscare thought. It was going to be difficult to source another loan chair so I decided that someone else having a go at it couldn’t do any harm. He stepped inside while I transferred to the sofa and he took my chair to the van.
It could not have been more than 10 minutes later when he came back in. The speed of his return didn’t really boost my hopes. The other mechanics had only spent a similar amount of time pondering a solution and I know from experience that if these guys actually do some work successfully it usually takes at least twice as long. Yet there was something about his demeanour when I looked up at him that changed the game. His sarcastic smile was replaced with one of seeming self-satisfaction.
“All done.” He said.
“Really?” I asked, not really daring to dream.
“Yeah, look.”
He took a wheel off with ease. Then the other. I asked him how he’d done it and he told me that he’d used a mallet. And a bit of lube. We’d actually hammered it with lubrication spray to no effect on the day it got stuck. But we haven’t got a mallet. That may have made all the difference but if so I can’t explain why the Doofus twins who turned up at work on Friday didn’t try it. Or why whoever they spoke to had told them it was impossible to do without taking it in for a few days. Our only working theory is that it may have taken some time for the lubrication we used to travel down to where it needed to be. After all, with the wheel jammed we couldn’t spray anything inside the axel.it was all on the outside slowly seeping in.
I have had this chair since 2015. It’s almost as much of a museum exhibit as the one they tried to foist on me before the miraculous repair. I have an appointment with wheelchair services towards the end of February. I guess it will be a few months after that until I get my new one. At least. It is almost a year since I ordered my next Motability car which is still to materialise. If that is anything to go by there may yet be more visits from Rosscare mechanics to endure.
