My wife and I are 77 years old, and live in a mountain community in Southwest Colorado.   In the winter of 2017, my wife tripped over a bathroom rug and broke her fibula in two places, just above the ankle.  After a highly complex surgery, she spent the first six weeks of recovery in a nursing home. The nursing home was fine, but my wife just hated being there.  In order for the nursing home to release her to go to our own home for the next stage of recovery, i.e. use of the “boot”, I had to show that I could meet ADA specs for moving around using a wheelchair.  

 

Our home is split level, with the kitchen, dining and living rooms down four steps (two feet) from the bedrooms and bathrooms.  To transport my wife between these two floors, I built a wooden, 22 foot long, wheelchair ramp. This took about three weeks to construct. Its presence required moving much of our furniture out of the dining and living rooms, and stacking the rest against the walls.  This ramp, together with a regular wheelchair, worked pretty well for the next two months of her recovery. However, the disruption to the household was tremendous.  

 

Unfortunately, the fibula/ankle/foot surgery of 2017 was unsuccessful.  This led to a new surgery in August 2019. The recovery projection is much the same as that for the first surgery.  By this time we had started considering using a motorized wheelchair, with a shorter ramp, to reduce the disruption of our home for the expected recovery period.   In fact, my wife was able to come home, directly from the surgery, instead of being stuck in the nursing home for the first six weeks as had been required previously

 

 We considered that a second benefit to getting a folding, motorized wheelchair would be taking it with us when we travel (air travel for the wheelchair is free).  Thus, we would be able to take the long walks near the beach with our kids in California, that we had been missing for the last few years because of increasing infirmity, and the steep grade from my son’s home to the beach..

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As everyone does, we looked at the specs, the capabilities, the reviews and the costs of a number of motorized wheelchairs.  The large, back-wheel configuration of the Porto Mobility Ranger Folding Power Wheelchair seemed particularly attractive to us because we anticipated we would use it often outside the house.  An attached figure shows my wife, in the Porto Mobility wheelchair, pruning in our orchard and garden, about six weeks after the surgery.  

 

Reviewers said if you want to climb, you need to have power.  And this unit does. Attached figures show my wife moving up and down the ramp between floor levels, where we have replaced the 22-foot long, wood ramp I had built two years earlier with a 10-foot long, aluminum one.  The living and dining rooms are largely intact. And my wife is now independent of me when she wants to go from one level to the next.

 

Finally, the distributor we used in California was quite helpful.  I told him that my wife was coming home on August 8 and we had to have the chair early enough to give us time to check it out.  I asked if he could check it before sending it. And it appeared that he, or at least someone did. It worked as described right out of the box.  

 

In fact, we have used the Ranger Wheelchair for nearly four months without problem.  We flew it to LA with the unit, and took two of those walks with our kids we had been missing.

 

Mike, Durango, CO.