Yard work in a wheelchair

I remember the first Thanksgiving after my accident when all the girls got up to do the dishes and I wasn’t expected to help anymore. That really bugged me.  I still wanted to do all of things I used to do. Sometimes it’s nice to ride that “get out of jail free card” when you have a new spinal cord injury and are in a wheelchair, but it’s only fun for so long.

Another timely example of this is yard work. It’s Fall. No one expects the guy in the wheelchair to get down and dirty when it comes to raking leaves, but one of my favorite SPINALpedia members WheelzofFortune is not your average guy in a wheelchair. He is a MacGyver of figuring things out sitting down.

In this video he shows how he can rake leaves from his wheelchair. You might learn a thing or two on the art form of raking piles close enough to you, and not running them over. If you have yard with trees and want to actually do some yard work this season, this is a must-see.

This second yard work video is on steroids. MarkB701, another one of our members, who is a T3 paraplegic from Georgia (originally from the UK) and injured in a motorcycle accident, shows how he uses a four wheeler to get himself out into the woods to – yes he is crazy – chainsaw down some trees.

He is an incomplete paraplegic so he can stand a little to get himself into a folding chair he brings with so he can cut the tree at it’s base (which he can’t do from the four wheeler, since he leaves his wheelchair at home).  It’s quite the funny video. His chainsaw gets stuck in one of the trees, and he has to think ON his feet/wheels. I could definitely see him doing a Halloween version of this!

You know, if you watch enough of the videos on our site, you will see that if you want to get back into doing all the mundane stuff you used to, it’s totally possible. Anything is. All it takes is some time to think outside the box and a little bit of sass to get yourself back out there.

How have you figured out to do something ‘mundane’ again that you missed?

Watch the videos!

– Raking leaves (Wheelchair user) (Paraplegic)

– Paraplegic fun with chainsaw in forest