If you were in a wheelchair... part 4

1. Last week's paragraph leads me to talk about handicap itself, at least as much as I know about it. There are different degrees in handicap according to which names vary. First we can distinguish tetraplegia from paraplegia. Tetraplegia concerns a four-limb paralysis, generally meaning a cervical lesion. The further down the lesion is on the spinal column, the « closer » you are to paraplegia which is a lower limbs paralysis. Tetraplegia, along with paraplegia, can be total or partial; which means that two paraplegics having the same kind of lesion can have different sensitivity and motricity. Welcome inside the human body…
2. How to manoeuvre your wheelchair is a very important thing that you are taught during your first weeks in re-education. This is when you learn to do some « wheeling », which consists in lifting up the front wheels. You can use that to show off, but more importantly it often proves useful to overcome the obstacles of the concrete jungle. To do that, you simply need to find your centre of gravity, which varies from one chair to the next… Get your figures wrong and you’ll fall backwards (potentially opening the way to a multitude of accidents) or ahead if your chair stumbles over something. When this happens, you just need to catch yourself in time and with style, so as to keep up appearances...
3. There are a lot of different types of tyres you can use for wheelchairs, but mainly you get two categories: hard ones and air tyres. With hard ones, any little bump or jump on the pavement will make your spine wince up to the neck, however they don’t get punctured and last longer. In my opinion air tyres are much more comfortable, but they have one main flaw: they get flat. When you happen to be on a street with what looks like leftovers from the celebration of a football match, be sure you’ll have to improvise some sort of rough mending. And when that happens twice in a row, you wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better for you just to stay at home.