This is Elana, Edda’s camp counselor. Headed to her freshman year at Columbia in the fall to study international relations, but spending the summer helping Edda have fun. Hooray for Elana! Edda is having the most fun in the pool, which is great to hear. But Edda can complain too (a lot), but Elana seems to manage it with good cheer.
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Our local durable medical equipment (DME) supplier (not so local actually – it’s located in Alexandria, VA) is so, so, so, so, very, very, very lame at ordering equipment. But every DRs office, supplier, vendor I call refers us to this DME. Even Montgomery County Public Schools has a contract with them to supply wheelchairs, adaptive toilets, adaptive seating etc. But they don’t answer emails, they don’t show up when they say they will, they forget what we ordered, they forget our names and our phone numbers. Anyways, we put in an order for a bath wheelchair May 11th and have heard nothing since. I’m not sure if they submitted it to insurance. I’m not sure if insurance is working on approving it, I don’t know where it is. Maybe insurance will not approve it, I have no idea the status of anything.
In the meantime, I’ve been giving Edda showers on a simple plastic chair and I’ve been asking our two main caregivers to give Edda showers. Edda now is almost 100 lb and if you think I’m little, you should stand me next to Nat or Kitachi and you will see just how much of a giant I am. Earlier this week, Edda slipped on the soapy seat in the shower and I couldn’t catch her fast enough. She was fine, she fell slowly onto her knees, but I yelled downstairs to Jeremy in tears that we needed to forget about insurance paying for the chair and order it ourselves.
And it came – expedited shipping and beautiful! Just kidding. It’s not beautiful, but it is excellent for the thing it is suppose to do – which is keep everyone safe and not slipping around like greased pigs. Using this chair, I can get her undressed in a dry place, wheel her into the shower, soap and rinse her, dry her, and wheel her out of the shower and back into her room. There is no lifting in the wet/soapy shower. Fantastic.
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To celebrate Friday, we went to Ben and Jerry’s for ice cream, where I decided that I want my nickname to be Dot.
And I played Pokemon Go on the drive home, where my player name is DorisMartin (bottom left of photo).
