My older chair is six years old

Moving to another nursing home in a different city wasn't easy. But then too, I moved away from my power chair vendor. Who would fix my chair now?

I moved to a north central Ohio nursing home in September 2010.

I did not take long for me to have a power chair problem. It happened in May 2011.

My chair just stopped and I thought because it was two years old the batteries were dead. I was out on a shopping trip and we had to get back to my nursing home.

My sister found a power chair tech 10 miles from me who would come to my nursing home and replace the batteries. It was just a matter of the small fee of $375.

But that's okay, my sister or I had been paying it every two years for a while. Medicaid quit buying power chair batteries several years before.

So the power chair tech came and changed out my batteries. I was impressed.

But then, I had trouble with the batteries. On an outing my chair just stopped going, my driver had to call the fire department to get me back into my van.

I ended up going to Columbus to a vendor who told me I just needed new batteries. He told me the power chair tech may have given me a bad set of batteries.

It took me a while to talk the original power chair tech into replacing the batteries without charge.

But in October 2011, he did. After that my chair worked fine.

But that vendor refused to do any more work on my chair. He said he never should've agreed in the first place. But I wondered if that was really the reason. It would certainly have been convenient to keep using him.

Instead, I went to Columbus about once a year to have my chair checked out.

Unfortunately, three years ago I made my last visit there. It is too far away and too expensive for me to make that trip anymore.

There is no vendor in this area.

When my chair turned five years old in 2013, I wondered if Medicaid would ever get me a new one.
My sister mentioned crowdfunding as a way to get others involved in assisting me to get a new power chair.

I talked with my nursing home in 2015 and they told me that Medicaid would purchase a power chair for me.

Since I'd been through that process once, I thought I could get through it again.

But little did I know how complicated it all would be.