I never talk about this publicly but I had an incident about 2-3 years ago where one of my wheelchairs wheels snapped off and I fell onto the ground and injured my head, waiting 45 minutes for an ambulance. Ever since then I’ve really struggled to feel comfortable in my own chair

The issue was in no part a fault of my own or that I could control. It wasn’t due to weight, driving conditions or past chair use. The wheelchair provider came to replace it, and their response? “Oh yeah it’s the framing on this chair. This has happened before”.

!!!!

I was lucky I was in an open-pavement area when it broke. If I was next to a fence or in a road the incident would’ve been 100x more severe

Since then I feel so unsafe going outside in my own wheelchair out of fear the wheel will snap. Not really sure what to do with that.

I have an appointment tomorrow for physiotherapy and I always get very fearful driving up the steep transport ambulance ramp that the same thing will happen again and I’ll fall off it. Honestly the whole event was so traumatic for me.

I feel like the first step to overcoming the fear and trauma that came from that event is to speak on it and maybe see what other wheelchair using folks have to say about it, so I wrote this thread to get it out! Thanks for reading