Nothing is simple

Finally got a chance to write something. Seem to have spent the last couple of weeks just bogged down sorting out setup of a new wheelchair and this hospital visit to get this ventilation equipment setup. I have given up on doing this at home, nobody other than me has the appetite to pursue it so I have given in to an overnight hospital stay. I go in this Wednesday but I have managed to get a carer to accompanying me and stay overnight.

The new wheelchair arrived last week but won't be setup until tomorrow. This is another stressful event. The reason for changing it is so I can do more things without having to use the offroad wheelchair. The existing indoor wheelchair is completely hopeless outdoors, is very uncomfortable when travelling in the car and has insuficient battery capacity to last a day when powering my eyegaze computer. The new wheelchair will address all these issues BUT it is a much bigger chair and although it technically fits everywhere, there are just millimetres to spare in some areas and I might struggle with my very limited control ability.
Everything has to be so exact now for me to still do the last few things I can manage alone.

Millimetres Matter.

Five millimetres inaccuracy with elbow positioning on wheelchair armrest will make operating it impossible. An inch or two too far left or right in bed will mean I can't operate the bed controls with my nose. So an entirely different wheelchair has plenty of potential for causing problems. Some aspects won't be immediately apparent. Seating and headrest positioning and design may initially seem fine but after 10 hours it might be excrutiatingly painful. So I need to keep the old wheelchair available for a few weeks so I can revert back while I wait for the next available free slot from the Wheelchair Services. This in turn requires everything on the current chair to be left intact, including the computer mounting system, and this means I have had to arrange for duplicate accesories to be fitted to the new chair AND arrange the relevant people to visit at the same time to fit them.

And of course everything has coincided with the hospital visit. I just hope it is all worth it and I don't solve three problems only to create three bigger ones!

This belt and braces approach has to be employed in almost everything I do. I don't consider myself to be a pesimistic person but I have always had the philosophy of 'expect the best outcome but prepare for the worst'
I think it has always served me well; in business, very few of my projects over 20 years went tits up because of considering all the points (including people) of potential failure and either designing them out or having a plan in place to deal with them if they occurred. But I also knew that when something completely unexpected happened I would somehow be able to get it resolved.

But now my ability to sort out the unexpected is severely limited, so it is more important than ever for me to have every base covered. It is time consuming and mentally exhausting but I can't live any other way.
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