Walk and Roll is full of cheerful, sensible and clever add-ons for walkers, wheelchairs and scooters. Author Lynn Gorges’ imaginative designs rely on commonly available household linens; they’re more varied, more colorful and more creative than any I have seen commercially made. I’m guessing that the patterns themselves are fairly simple, but Lynn’s planning could save a lot of precious pre-holiday time.

Lynn has done a very nice job on the details, too. Notice the trim below the seat on the walker on the book cover? A distinctive walker pouch is often a source of pride in my dad’s nursing home — this kind of trim could escalate bragging rights (and the opportunities for social interaction) through the roof!

There are all kinds of different motifs on Lynn’s webpage: a carrier with a cupholder that looks as if it rivals the ones I’ve written about here and here, and a walker pouch that integrates a license plate. Finding these accessories for men is difficult unless black vinyl gives you a thrill; Lynn’s book lets you incorporate anyone’s interests into an attractive gift, whether the recipient is male or female.

What sets Lynn’s designs apart is the quality of her work. Though these projects are meant to be made by loving hands at home, they look as if they’ve been custom-designed just for your recipient. Lynn’s done the planning and made the patterns; you get the fun of putting it all together.

Walk and Roll , via Minding Our Elders

Special thanks to Isabelle from the blog Senior Friendly Libraries

. . . there are millions of people with disabilities who eventually discover they can enjoy sexual satisfaction despite their physical limitations. Unfortunately, they often receive very little support or information from parents or rehab professionals who may be too embarrassed to too uncomfortable to attempt a discussion of this issue. Even in an era of sexual enlightenment, a code of silence seems to envelop the issue of disabilities and sexuality.

Enabling Romance does a beautiful job of filling in the void. Subtitled A Guide to Love, Sex, and Relationships For People With Disabilities, this book is divided into three sections: first is “The Final Taboo: Sexual Satisfaction for People with Disabilities”; second is “Living and Loving with Specific Disabilities”; third is an appendix section listing helpful resources.

Romance is well-written, straightforward, and direct. As is typical of ’self-help’ books, the text is peppered with personal anecdotes; atypically, the stories told here are not bland, power-of-positive-thinking screeds, but specific and detailed in terms of what the sexual relationships mean to the people involved. It’s that much more powerful as a result. This is a manual for reclaiming a fundamental part of human experience, and a vehicle for living life as fully as possible, in spite of inconvenient impediments.

This is a book that probably ought to be handed out on every SCI rehab ward, but its scope is much larger. Polio, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, blindness, and amputation and a variety of other disabilities are specifically addressed as well. There’s sensible advice on dating and relationships, and insightful commentary about what to expect when people with disabilities get involved with people without disabilities.

Parents or others who are uncomfortable or uncertain about the sexual lives of people they love who have disabilities are likely to find Romance an excellent resource for themselves, as well. It’s a powerful reminder that living with a disability does not, and need not, require an asexual existence.

Illustrations in the book are graphic but tasteful, and give visual credence to the idea that lovemaking is possible even when the standard equipment is not fully functional, or when working around a device or two is necessary. The book was first published in 1992; some of the information in the appendices may be outdated, but that’s a minor concern now with the Internet at our disposal, and online searches just a keyboard (or voice recognition system) away.

The tone of the book is informal and conversational. Each of the twenty-six stories is essentially a stream-of-consciousness tale, a slice of the life of the teller. The stories are full of human resentments, love, confusion, anger, contradictions and emotional pain.

The inherent questions of care-giving reappear again and again: the uncertainty, the inability to know if decisions are right (or right enough); if wishes are being met; if frail elders are being cared for as they should be.

This isn’t a book that can (or tries to) answer unanswerable questions. There’s a sadness and a sense of doubt underlying most, if not all, of the stories. Nearly everyone seems to wonder “Am I doing this right?” “Is this how it’s supposed to be?” Care-giving, it seems, does not inspire self-confidence; perhaps it does quite the opposite.

People who have never cared for others in these ways would probably find Minding Our Elders a little baffling: This isn’t a ‘how-to’ handbook, or any kind of a guide through the perils of care-giving.

It’s not a book of saints, either. There are enough troubled relationships here to keep a New York psychiatrist busy for years. Therein, it seems to me, lies the book’s strength: these stories are ordinary and real, and, as such, oddly reassuring.

This 135 page work lives up to its billing as a “portable support group” — a reminder that care-givers are not alone. Others have gone before, and will come after, each struggling in his or her imperfect way to meet impossible needs; each searching for answers to questions that cannot be resolved. Minding Our Elders is a reminder that the impossibilities of care-giving, if inescapable, are perfectly normal.

Carrol Bradley Bursack is also the author of an informative blog by the same name, covering a wide range of topics related to aging and eldercare. (There’s also a link to Minding Our Elders under “Blogs-Related” to the right of this post.)

GIMP is the story of the aftermath, written in Zupan’s voice by co-author Tim Swanson. It’s gritty and real. It’s explicit, and is brutally, not to say crudely, straightforward about what quadriplegic injuries meant to Zupan then and what they’ve meant in the years since.

The driver, Zupan’s friend Chris Igoe, was thrown out of the bar where he and Zupan had been drinking. Igoe was similarly stupefied when he got into the truck, drove away and crashed it. Unknowingly, he tossed Zupan from the truck’s bed over a six-foot fence and into a watery canal, paralyzing him for life and nearly killing him.

GIMP chronicles the relationship between Zupan and Igoe, Zupan’s rehabilitation, his rise to star status in the documentary Murderball, and his career as a wheelchair rugby player.

Here’s how Zupan describes his return home from rehab, after the accident:

As [my brother] spread his arms, and leaned over to embrace me, I socked him squarely in the nuts. He fell over backward into the pantry, knocking cans of food and boxes of cereal off the shelves . . .

“If you think that just because I’m in a wheelchair I’m not going to beat the shit out of you, you’re sorely mistaken,” I said.

That’s the essence of what’s wrong with this book, with this life, with this story. Zupan grew up in a world where unthinking acts and instant gratification were cultural values. He grew up in a family, and a society, that accepted these kinds of interactions. His teen years were spent in places where underage drinking was the norm (and even facilitated by parents). He lived in a social milieu that ignored and all-but-glorified the anti-social behaviors of adolescent males.

Zupan and his pal Igoe were irresponsible jerks as boys; that much is clear, and Zupan provides plenty of evidence to prove it in the book. For the most part, they seem to have remained irresponsible jerks as they moved into putative adulthood. That’s well-documented, too.

Eventually, both Zupan and Igoe end up drinking themselves into oblivion again and again, but Zupan still doesn’t seem to feel this is a problem. Here’s how he describes his (post-paralysis) arrest for DUI:

“I had a nice buzz going as I loaded my chair into the passenger seat. I didn’t feel that drunk . . .”

“I actually decided to hide my DUI conviction, my court-ordered Alcoholics Anonymous classes, and my eighteen months’ probation from my parents and most of my friends.”

A lot of blather about ‘honesty’ follows, which is pretty meaningless in the context of the choices Zupan has made, and, apparently, continues to make.

Zupan is one uppity self-described ‘gimp’ whose aggressive stance toward the world seems, at first glance, like something worth cheering. Obviously, I’m not the only one who wants to take a shotgun to the able-bodied idiot whose just parked in the only ‘handicap’ slot within miles of a venue. But merely celebrating a ‘gimp’s’ uppityness isn’t really of very much value to either the gimp or to others in the same boat.

Rebelling against anything — stereotypes, stupidity, authority — is exhausting and self-limiting. Lasting change tends to require something more sustainable — something positive that displaces the negative. Adolescents rebel blindly: adults eventually, one hopes, find the maturity to change their world for the better instead of merely tantruming.

There’s not much here that follows that model.

Zupan eventually finishes college and becomes an civil engineer, working for an apparently generous and tolerant firm which gives him plenty of leave to promote both his book and pursue his interest in quad rugby. However, not many people with quadriplegic or paraplegic injuries are likely to be as fortunate in every regard as Zupan has been. Zupan’s intelligence and his extra-ordinary athletic ability have allowed him a life others can only dream of — for now.

Even for Zupan, though, this may turn out to be more dream than reality. The highs of extreme athletics, of the stardom of Murderball, of constant travel and stimulation promoting both film and book will eventually diminish.

That’s the point where Zupan’s life and others’ will finally intersect — out of the spotlight, where earning a living and buying groceries and finding an entrance a wheelchair can actually get through are more omnipresent issues than attention and celebrity. That’s where things called ‘character’ and ’self-discipline’ matter, where quality of life is dependent on internal strengths.

Ultimately, this is a story about wasted gifts. Zupan and Igoe are young men with better-than-average intelligence and better-than-average advantages who threw them all away. They are young men who, having thereby achieved disastrous results, continue to behave exactly as they did before the cataclysm that put Zupan in a wheelchair and condemned Igoe to a lifetime of mental anguish.

That’s not inspiring; it’s just stupid. It’s also lousy preparation for a meaningful future life. As for the book, it’s one sorrowful story about human frailty.

At 7 by 4 inches, it’s about the size of a small paperback, and fairly light at only 9 ounces. It recharges in about 4 hours, and each charge is good for about 7,500 page “turns” — according to the review, the approximate equivalent of about 7 book’s worth of page-turning.

‘Books’ can be purchased at the Sony Connect store. For you those of you who speak the lingo, the Reader uses BBeB as well as PDF, TXT and RTF formats.

Quite pricey at $350 (USD), but maybe just the tool for the right avid reader who has difficulty turning pages and holding conventional books.

Read the whole, information-packed review on Cool Tools.

Available on the Sony website, and at Best Buy.

Update: Maybe the Reader’s available at a brick-and-mortar Best Buy somewhere, but not in the Mid-Atlantic states right now; none in stores, and none in “the warehouse”. I stopped by yesterday (5/18/07) hoping to see one, and an employee checked BB’s internal inventory system, with that rather dismal result.

I wish I could say that I loved the book. In spirit, it’s much like what GearAbility is about — fixes, adaptations and work-arounds for everyday life. As a book, though, it’s quite a disappointment.

There’s a fair amount of very simple, helpful advice here. However, all the left-hand pages are blank — at the top of each, the word “Notes” is written. It’s not clear why any reader would need a whole blank page to record variations on an adaptation that only inspired a three-sentence description by the author. Most of the right-hand pages are at least 50% blank — meaning that nearly 75% of this 183 page book is without any content at all.

Worse, there’s a lot of duplication of ideas from page to page — there are four numbered pages in the book, for instance, that offer this tip: Sticking hook-and-loop tape under plates will make them hard to push or throw.

Two pages offer this advice:

Floor Protector

This modification is great! Your floor will stay clean.

Vinyl Tablecloth

Place a vinyl tablecloth under your child’s chair.

That’s the entire section. Without meaning to be a curmudgeon, isn’t this parenting 101? Was it really necessary to make this the only item on two full pages?

And then there’s this:

Magnifying Print

Using this adaptation will perhaps enable someone to see their reading material more clearly.

Magnifying Glass

Reading Material

Hold the magnifying glass against your reading material. This will enable a person to more easily see smaller print.

This, too, is the entire tip, spread over two pages. Most of us probably won’t need to buy a disability-specific book to figure this out.

The relatively few photos (all black-and-white) are very poor quality. Mostly, they’re absent. For instance, the instructions for building a “Paper Holder” made of wood are confusing to read. The device is supposed to be some kind of aid for cutting, but it seems to be a sort of clipboard with a hole in the middle — which raises more questions than it answers. Even a poor image might have helped here.

The book is geared toward kids; there’s a section on games with what looks to me like pretty standard primary- and elementary- school art advice. (Put objects and water in a plastic bag for a tactile experience; put paint into closed containers to make spills less likely — though the book actually advises putting paint into “hair gel containers”. Come again?) The writing’s not always clear, and the ideas are sometimes obscure.

Better organized and edited for clarity, this tome would have made a really great brochure, but it’s a pretty thin excuse for a book. At the moment, Amazon has four in stock for $11.66 (USD), and a supply of used and new beginning at $9.15 (USD). I’d put this one in the ‘well, it can’t hurt, but it’s not a great value-for-the-money’ category.

Observant, thoughtful parents and caregivers won’t find a great deal here that they can’t figure out on their own. This one gets an ‘A’ for heart, and a ‘D’ for execution.

Related: Handmade Helps for Disabled Living

Many of the items described are now available commercially (a reacher; a sock aid; a book rest), but many of the plans are for things difficult to find or prohibitively expensive. There is a clever “page restrainer” to hold pages in place when a book is being read; a simple page-turner made from ordinary household objects; and a marvelous “tidy trough” that, unlike virtually every desk organizer I’ve ever seen, actually makes it easy to retrieve items (pens, paperclips, etc.,) from their bins.

There’s a simple urine-bottle rack I wish every hospital would use, instead of putting the bottle on the same table used for eating, as is (apparently) universal practice.

My favorite project is something called “the holdfast”, which is designed to hold a jar or a box vertically, or things like bread, salami or cucumbers horizontally — all so that they can be used or sliced with only one hand. Two-inch wide nylon webbing makes it work. Second-favorite is the brilliant and simple “buckled spiral” designed to allow someone missing one hand to hold pens, dining implements, etc. with a forearm. It’s made of a short section of PVC pipe, rubber gas pipe, and webbing.

When I lived in farm country, virtually every other person I knew had the skills and the tools to make these projects. These days, and in most areas in the USA, people generally don’t. This is a book well-worth taking a look at, though, because it may change your view of your world just a little bit, and inspire unexpected solutions to everyday problems. In his introductory comments, Grainger writes:

There are several beautifully simple aids which are immediately available in most homes, so simple that they are often overlooked. Such items as clothes pegs and Bulldog paper clips have numerous uses in addition to those for which they were designed . . . [T]wo large Bulldog clips can be bolted together . . . clamp . . . to a heavy weight . . . and you have a stable miniature vice . . . for holding anything from macrame cords to a fishing fly. . . . [O]rdinary corks [can improve the grip on] such tools as knitting needles and crochet hooks.

Once you’ve seen how Grainger views things, your own creativity may blossom. Almost every project is within reach of a patient suburban hobbiest; most use ordinary materials like plywood and PVC piping. If you’re not inspired to outfit your own small shop, Grainger has a page of suggestions for finding willing craftspeople to do the job for you. What you want is someone who lives and breathes Grainger’s approach to life:

Keep your imagination finely tuned to possibilities beyond those which the designer intended. The habit of automatically evaluating every available article . . . . is a fascinating and precious acquisition.

Originally published in the UK in 1981, then again (my edition) in 1990; Photos and clear, beautifully-executed sketches and instructions. (ISBN-10: 0713439351 or ISBN-13 : 978-0713439359.)

Fourteen (“used and new”) are available from Amazon, beginning at the amazing price of $2.15 USD.

UPDATE: As of this morning, there’s only one left on Amazon, with the price jacked up to a rather ridiculous (not to say opportunistic) $103 (USD). AbeBooks has nine listed, though, from $5 (USD) to $26 (USD) — most are in the UK, but the quoted shipping rates (to the USA) look quite reasonable.