TIED DOWN
When you are required to wear an oxygen tube to supply or augment your need, you will learn what it means to be restricted – many would say “like a dog on a leash.”
There is one army experience I can equate with the feeling which crept over and through me the first time I was required to breath through a gas mask in a gas-filled chamber. Both actions, you see, were for my ultimate good. They each had some element of choice, I suppose, but one would be foolish to refuse to try them as potential pathways to desired physical ease and very existence.
No hurry, you say. That will never happen to me. I used to say that. A hard-talking man wearing three strips of authority on his uniform sleeve told me to enter the gas chamber, so I did it. Decades later, a man a wearing white coat prescribed a regular supply of adequate oxygen. I agreed.
You quickly learn to modify your life style to suit your capabilities.
Much of the change which will take place depends on the nature of your handicap. Mine involves the use of wheel chair for more involved or extended mobility requirements. That means, in transit, I can make use of a seven-pound tank which is attached to the back of the chair. Among improvement in that area: my tank exudes oxygen only on demand from my breathing. A supply lasts longer for new economy. My in-house installation consists of a unit which “makes oxygen” - don't ask me how, but it does – and that is connected to me by small, plastic tubing line -a twenty- five foot length plus a seven foot length which, with the production unit gives me a travel range to suit my daily work routine. The tubing will be a headache for some . It has built-in tendency to tangle and to catch on the oddest little projections. If you have a cat or dog it can drive them wacko with movement from no apparent cause. Some like to chew them.
Don't-do's include. Don't place your oxygen production unit under the heat activated sprinkler system thing. Ours went off in the middle of the night and the system is connected so every unit in the entire house was set a-dinging!
A second don't. When you move the unit away from the alarm, don't set in the next room just around the corner near the thermostat on the wall., or your air-conditioning system will run day and night and day and night and day and - so on!
I'm still working on finding something to keep my ears from getting sore. They have little pads and big, pencil-sized, cottony pads to tape around tubing but they move up and down, knot-up, slide and tear. They don't seem to like being there any more than we do.
On the whole, however, it's a good life ...an extension of what you have found to have been good for you in the past. Cheer up. Your later life is largely what you choose to make it.
A.L.M. September 10, 2004 [c523wds]
