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Adam Traub has little money, no right hip and a new $14,000 wheelchair that’s too big for him so that he continually slips out of it and can barely navigate the narrow doorways of his Hintonburg apartment.
In the meantime, he borrowed $800 to get a new battery to keep his aging seven-year-old chair on the road and has been seeking new bearings and grease that the former mechanic hopes will let him fix its worn out wheels.
The new tilt-equipped chair sits in a spare room unused. Traub is frustrated that his complaints to the Champlain Rehab Solutions, which oversees his care via the Champlain Community Care Access Centre, and Motion Specialities, which supplied the chair, have gone unresolved. His chair is too big and no amount of fiddling or adjusting will change that, he says.
“Two years I’ve been waiting for this,” said Traub. “They’re trying to take a station wagon and turn it into a sedan. But it’s still going to be a station wagon.”
Traub has been dependent on his Canadian-made Quickie Xperience electric wheelchair since 2010 when he went into the Ottawa Hospital for a hip replacement and ending staying for nearly a year. After numerous operations, the doctors gave up trying to fix the damage.
“The doctors said, ‘Adam, your bones are no good,'” Traub says, in his thick Balkans accent. Traub came to Canada from the former Yugoslavia in 1968 and worked as a mechanic and later as a used car salesman. Now he lives on the modest Ontario Disability Pension in an Ottawa Housing apartment on Wellington Street.
The new chair, an updated Quickie Xperience2, is such a tight fit that the arms scrape and squeal against the doorframe, leaving black skid marks. The chair’s wheels spins as Traub tries to power through. The control stick is too close, forcing Traub to cant his arm awkwardly to operate it.
Worse, he says the chair doesn’t fit properly on a regular OC Transpo bus, severely limiting his ability to get around town. And the bar holding the footrest clears the ground by barely a centimetre. Traub was on Bank Street once when the bar caught on a bump and he was thrown from the chair. Fortunately, two passersby were there to help him back in. The seat is too long and meant for someone much taller than he is, meaning he continually slides forward and is left with an aching back after just a couple of hours sitting.
While the new chair sits idle, Traub still scoots around on his old chair, its backrest patched with electrical tape.
“With this (new chair) I can’t go nowhere,” he says. “I’m like a prisoner here. Why can’t they get one the fits my body?”
Adam Traub demonstrates his new $14,000 wheelchair that sits idle in his apartment, but uses the worn seven-year old chair at left instead.
Traub has kept copies of his correspondence with the various agencies and parts suppliers. He’s frustrated by their lack of action. “This isn’t a murder story you’re writing about. It’s a wheelchair!” says the former boxer. (“Adam’s a nice guy,” a friend and neighbour concedes to the Citizen, “but he can get up in your face a bit,”)
The CCAC referred Traub to Champlain Rehab Solutions for occupational therapy services. He was assessed in June 2015 and recommended for a new electric chair with tilt capacity to help him in and out of the reclining chair where he sleeps every night. The chair would be eligible to be fully paid for by the province’s Assistive Device Program, which in turn bought its equipment from Shoppers Home Health Care. The purchase was approved in February 2016, but a month later the supplier contract switched to Motion Specialities. The new chair was eventually delivered in April 2016.
Correspondence from Champlain Rehab that Traub shared shows he made his complaints about the new chair known in June 2016 and was told the model he wanted was no longer made. The company offered to change the seat cushion and adjust the foot brace and arm rest but says the original Xperience that Traub wanted is no longer in production and, in any event, didn’t include the electric tilting mechanism.
It offered him a choice: accept the chair with whatever modifications they could do or refuse it, which would cause him to lose the funding and be discharged from care by the CCAC and forced to begin the entire process from the beginning.
Traub called it blackmail and eventually agreed to accept the chair. But he’s still fuming.
Champlain Rehab Solutions was reluctant to speak specifically about Traub’s case, despite his signing a release allowing them to do so.
“Our goal is always to ensure that patients are satisfied with devices they receive and that the devices meet their needs. If adjustments or changes are necessary, we continue to work with the patient to explore all possible options,” the company’s communications manager, Pamela Stoikopoulos, said in an email.
That can take time, she said, depending on the chair’s complexity, the number of adjustments required, the manufacturer’s ability to deliver the items, and the funding process.
“Fitting and funding equipment is a collaborative process: Champlain Rehab Solutions (CRS), the CCAC, the equipment vendor and the patient work together. Any ongoing concerns about equipment can be raised with CRS and the CCAC. In addition, both CRS and the CCAC have ‘open door’ follow-up and complaints processes available to our patients.”
But two years after being told he was getting a new chair, that’s cold comfort for Traub, whose world, literally depends on his wheelchair. For him, a few centimetres here and there, the size and comfort of its cushion, means everything.
“I’m sitting 16, 18 hours in it. That’s my life,” he says. Then, pointing to the new chair, he says, “I can’t sit in that one for two hours.”
bcrawford@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/getBAC
查看原文...
In the meantime, he borrowed $800 to get a new battery to keep his aging seven-year-old chair on the road and has been seeking new bearings and grease that the former mechanic hopes will let him fix its worn out wheels.
The new tilt-equipped chair sits in a spare room unused. Traub is frustrated that his complaints to the Champlain Rehab Solutions, which oversees his care via the Champlain Community Care Access Centre, and Motion Specialities, which supplied the chair, have gone unresolved. His chair is too big and no amount of fiddling or adjusting will change that, he says.
“Two years I’ve been waiting for this,” said Traub. “They’re trying to take a station wagon and turn it into a sedan. But it’s still going to be a station wagon.”
Traub has been dependent on his Canadian-made Quickie Xperience electric wheelchair since 2010 when he went into the Ottawa Hospital for a hip replacement and ending staying for nearly a year. After numerous operations, the doctors gave up trying to fix the damage.
“The doctors said, ‘Adam, your bones are no good,'” Traub says, in his thick Balkans accent. Traub came to Canada from the former Yugoslavia in 1968 and worked as a mechanic and later as a used car salesman. Now he lives on the modest Ontario Disability Pension in an Ottawa Housing apartment on Wellington Street.
The new chair, an updated Quickie Xperience2, is such a tight fit that the arms scrape and squeal against the doorframe, leaving black skid marks. The chair’s wheels spins as Traub tries to power through. The control stick is too close, forcing Traub to cant his arm awkwardly to operate it.
Worse, he says the chair doesn’t fit properly on a regular OC Transpo bus, severely limiting his ability to get around town. And the bar holding the footrest clears the ground by barely a centimetre. Traub was on Bank Street once when the bar caught on a bump and he was thrown from the chair. Fortunately, two passersby were there to help him back in. The seat is too long and meant for someone much taller than he is, meaning he continually slides forward and is left with an aching back after just a couple of hours sitting.
While the new chair sits idle, Traub still scoots around on his old chair, its backrest patched with electrical tape.
“With this (new chair) I can’t go nowhere,” he says. “I’m like a prisoner here. Why can’t they get one the fits my body?”
Adam Traub demonstrates his new $14,000 wheelchair that sits idle in his apartment, but uses the worn seven-year old chair at left instead.
Traub has kept copies of his correspondence with the various agencies and parts suppliers. He’s frustrated by their lack of action. “This isn’t a murder story you’re writing about. It’s a wheelchair!” says the former boxer. (“Adam’s a nice guy,” a friend and neighbour concedes to the Citizen, “but he can get up in your face a bit,”)
The CCAC referred Traub to Champlain Rehab Solutions for occupational therapy services. He was assessed in June 2015 and recommended for a new electric chair with tilt capacity to help him in and out of the reclining chair where he sleeps every night. The chair would be eligible to be fully paid for by the province’s Assistive Device Program, which in turn bought its equipment from Shoppers Home Health Care. The purchase was approved in February 2016, but a month later the supplier contract switched to Motion Specialities. The new chair was eventually delivered in April 2016.
Correspondence from Champlain Rehab that Traub shared shows he made his complaints about the new chair known in June 2016 and was told the model he wanted was no longer made. The company offered to change the seat cushion and adjust the foot brace and arm rest but says the original Xperience that Traub wanted is no longer in production and, in any event, didn’t include the electric tilting mechanism.
It offered him a choice: accept the chair with whatever modifications they could do or refuse it, which would cause him to lose the funding and be discharged from care by the CCAC and forced to begin the entire process from the beginning.
Traub called it blackmail and eventually agreed to accept the chair. But he’s still fuming.
Champlain Rehab Solutions was reluctant to speak specifically about Traub’s case, despite his signing a release allowing them to do so.
“Our goal is always to ensure that patients are satisfied with devices they receive and that the devices meet their needs. If adjustments or changes are necessary, we continue to work with the patient to explore all possible options,” the company’s communications manager, Pamela Stoikopoulos, said in an email.
That can take time, she said, depending on the chair’s complexity, the number of adjustments required, the manufacturer’s ability to deliver the items, and the funding process.
“Fitting and funding equipment is a collaborative process: Champlain Rehab Solutions (CRS), the CCAC, the equipment vendor and the patient work together. Any ongoing concerns about equipment can be raised with CRS and the CCAC. In addition, both CRS and the CCAC have ‘open door’ follow-up and complaints processes available to our patients.”
But two years after being told he was getting a new chair, that’s cold comfort for Traub, whose world, literally depends on his wheelchair. For him, a few centimetres here and there, the size and comfort of its cushion, means everything.
“I’m sitting 16, 18 hours in it. That’s my life,” he says. Then, pointing to the new chair, he says, “I can’t sit in that one for two hours.”
bcrawford@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/getBAC
查看原文...
