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June 1997 |
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June 1997 |
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they merely become old fossils.
Contributed by Arthur Segal, Retired
Since mid-February of this year, I have been using an RSC 1000. This is a Radio Shack Product which is called the RSC 1000 Monitoring Emergency Alert System. It is a box into which your telephone is plugged and around your neck you wear something which looks like a heart-shaped locket. The locket has two buttons on the front and one is an "on" button and the other is an "off" button. When the button is depressed, or "on", it dials the ORCA Monitoring Emergency Alert System which will call you back. If you do not answer the phone they will, in order, dial three persons or organizations that you have designated to come assist you in getting up from the floor or whatever the emergency is that keeps you from getting to the telephone. The system can be connected to lights so that if you live in a single home, it will turn on lights showing the emergency release where you are. I have fallen several times, although this was before the system. I have not really fallen since I received the system, but I have tested it numerous times and received the call back in less than a minute from the monitoring station. I consider this a good device for calling for emergency help. The equipment is purchased from the Radio Shack and a modest monthly fee is paid to ORCA for the monitoring.
I have been a blind person since I became blind due to a traumatic eye injury at the age of eight., and therefore, have been blind for decades. At that time, I was in the hospital for months over the summer and parts of the fall. A blind person almost immediately came to the hospital to start teaching me Braille. And when I left the hospital in the fall, a couple of old blind guys who worked at the local sheltered shop in my home town made for me a cane from bamboo and taught me how to use it. When I went to school, a residential school for the blind at the age of nine, my Braille lessons, of course, continued by the use of the slate and stylus, however, we were not encouraged as young blind children to use canes and got around the school on our own. As high school age students there was at that time, no organized program for teaching cane travel. One of the blind teachers in the school was perfectly willing to teach anyone in the school who asked him his method for the use of cane and traveling independently. I therefore have been using a cane most of my life, and right after concluding college, I did work at a rehab center teaching cane travel and improving my technique. While I was still in high school, which was right after the second world war, a number of veterans came from army and navy rehab centers to finish their high school education, and from them, I learned much about the use of the long white cane, which was taught to them at the rehab center. I have overall, been using the cane then, for more than 60 years and this has been my traveling technology.
My Braille skills never got past the slate and stylus. When I was a child in school there were only a few Braille writers and only the blind teachers and a few selected "big deals" got to use a Braille writer. I have never really learned to use the Braille writer, although I understand how it works and could plug away. I did become a fairly proficient typist and this was my method of communicating with other people.
In July of 1996, I fell and received a serious injury. My right arm was broken and my body was severely scuffed. To this date, the range of my right arm is not totally recovered nor is the use of my right hand. I can at this point, shave and brush teeth and eat with my right hand although a bone meal will tire the arm. The scuffing of my body caused me to have cellulitus in my right leg and I required a number of surgical procedures to breed the skin and then I received a graft on my lower right leg from the skin taken from my lower right thighs, and then my rehabilitation began. Dressing is still a problem for me since I cannot do two-handed tasks easily. Such tasks as buttoning buttons, hooking hooks, and fastening a belt. My bathroom has been converted so that I have in my shower, bars for support and a portable shower bench. This enables me to shave and shower independently. My toilet has been fitted with a frame with arms which literally has made my toilet into a comfortable throne, which allows me to raise and lower myself. I have not as yet, and probably will not, become a member of the computer using community because old dinosaurs do not easily take to high tech. I require a wheelchair for distance travel, however, within a two hundred to three hundred foot range I can get around with a walker. The walker that I use is called a Pegasus.
This is, in my opinion, a very good walker. It has two wheels at each of four corners which gives it very good balance. The walker comes equipped with a tray for carrying items, a seat if you get tired, and under the seat, a canvas bag which will hold about as much as a supermarket bag.
I also have purchased an electric chair which raises and lowers, and will literally stand you up out of the chair. The chair also has a vibrator and heating system in the back. I also have purchased an electric bed, which is much like a hospital bed, it raises head or foot or both and of course, lowers to a flat bed and it has a vibrator in the bed. This is a fine creature comfort. Old dinosaurs can continue on if they have good creature comforts and the comforts that I have now provided to myself provide me with good creature comforts. And if a dinosaur, together with his creature comforts, has an occasional gourmet dinner and a good bottle of wine, he can survive even if it is as an old fossil.
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