Nov 17th, 2006, 01:56 AM
The first time I ever worked on what is commonly referred to as a "sip and puff" controlled power wheelchair, it was about 11:30pm at a nursing home way down in rural Georgia. I hate nursing homes, and I especially hate them when they are way out in the country. Unfortunately, though my company specializes in very custom pediatric work, due to Medicaid red-tape in my state some of my lately grown-up clients have to spend three months or more in the Hell of an institution like this to qualify for the funding required to live more or less independently...
Anyhoo, here I am, sitting on the self-stick tiled floor of this backwoods old-folks-home in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, having finally gotten the person that originally sold the defective machine on the phone... this, by the way, is a power chair driven by the user's breath or suction (thus, sip and puff) delivered by means of a straw... and I notice a cockroach scuttling across the floor as I am instructed that I am going to have to trace the tubing back to the control box, where upon I, in order to determine the reason the chair is no longer running correctly, am to give the box "a command."
I requested some sort of clarification for this instruction. I was told that the box only responded to either some sort of blowing or some sort of sucking commands. It was inferred that my own lips would be required for further diagnosis, but the exact use of them... be it for sucking or blowing... was left up to me, apparently.
Tiring of my visual search for that cockroach, I studied my client. Mark had been bed-bound for about twelve years now, since his accident. Covered with bedsores, mostly due to the negligence of the overweight, under-IQ'd nightstaff of the home, he was a pitiful, pussy, bloody and overall leaky sight. I considered the fact that, though what was being asked of me was WAY beyond the call of duty, Mark had been without any independent mobility for weeks now, and this chair... only two months after it's original construction... was broken. I knew that this chair was the first method of independence Mark had had since he'd been hit by that drunk driver all those years ago. I could only imagine what he ahd been through, living in this place for all that time at the grace of his hillbilly keepers that hated him for what they considered to be the undue responsiblity his extensive care, changing and feeding required of them. I knew how much he wanted me... anybody... to help him regain his ability to do something... anything... for himself.
I considered my options. Going straight home, though tempting, was out of the question, unfortunately. As much as I wanted to help him, though not willing to commit my mouth so readily to commanding Mark's box to make his chair move, I thought deep and hard about what else might be the problem. The technician on the phone suggested that maybe Mark's inexperience with the drive control for his chair had led to an attempt to drive too soon after eating... Maybe the straw had just gotten clogged on his puree.
I quickly unbolted the apparatus and hurried to the sink in the bathroom he shared with three other inmates... err, patients. I meticulously washed the tubing with scalding hot water. When I reattached the interface to the black box, I can assure you I felt a deep, deep sensation of dread when I realized that some sort of food globule was not the problem. There I was, back at the point where I had to suck and/or blow on that damn black box.
Eventually, I found my lips blowing through a small circle... curl your index finger and thumb as if you were gripping a pencil using only those two digits, then pucker up and blow through them... into the recepticle on that black box. Having produced no effect whatsoever, it was suggested that I try a "sip" command. Let me tell you, I blew on that damn thing for all I had, trying my best to get that chair to go... before I sucked.
Y'know what was the worst part? This being the first time I'd ever worked on such a complicated chair, I had no idea of what happened after that black box. I learned there's another inline device called a "spit-trap." For some reason, it's located AFTER the control box that deciphers the difference between the "sips" and the "puffs." Go figure.
It turns out that during the construction of Mark's power chair, the spit-trap had been fastened down in a location unfortunately succeptible to being pinched when the seating system was tilted back, and it had been cracked when he had, at some point, tilted back. Well, I eventually found that the resulting little crack in the spit-trap relieved all the pressure on the control system, causing the chair to be blind to any sort of sucking or blowing commands given by me or Mark, no matter how grossed out either of us were by the process of doing so.
I love my job, though.
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you have purty hair.
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