Caregiving: an amphibious outing

Caregiving regardless of preparation or experience will hit you with the unexpected, even the unimaginable. 

 

Thursday we headed out for a family outing of an afternoon movie matinee of Disney & Pixar Studios’ “Ratatouille”. Shortly before and during our travel, thunderstorms drowned our area in 3 inches of rain.

 

Fording one stretch of road transformed into a stream, I heard Megan exclaiming from the back seat. The floor of our van was suddenly a pond with water sloshing and rippling back and forth. Fortunately she was wearing ‘crocs’ shoes. (perhaps a commercial endorsement opportunity?)

 

Patti’s wheelchair foot rests were keeping her shoes just barely above the water level. Patti’s cognitively impaired MS confusion often demonstrates a knack for comic relief as she observed, “Well, we needed the rain.” <grin>

 

We must have looked like some amphibious vehicle with gallons and gallons of water pouring out of our van as we drove onto higher ground and our ‘in-van’ pool drained back to the street.

 

Apparently our lowered floor for wheelchair accessibility is not water tight “when submerged” where the ramp joins with the floor.

Though not marketed for fording small streams and rivers, our Dodge Grand Caravan with IMS Conversion actually handled this surprise rather well. We passed multiple cars conked out and stranded in the flash flood stream.

 

Thank God for modern technology and our Hoover SteamVac. After returning home from the movies it sucked out 13 gallons of water still soaked into the carpeting. Making the best of a bad situation I then loaded in some rug shampoo and re-ran the SteamVac. The van carpeting has not looked this good since we bought it. 

Oh and by the way, WE ALL enjoyed the movie.

Caregivingly Yours, Patrick Leer

Tags: caregiving, Multiple Sclerosis, Ratatouille, Dodge Grand Caravan, IMS Conversion