Stairlift and Stairlifts
After granddad passed away last winter, my father started to worry about grandma. She’d just turned seventy-three and she couldn’t get around quite as good as she used to. In particular, she had trouble making it up and down the stairs. Sometimes she had to stop on the landing for a rest and sometimes she couldn’t make it up the stairs at all. A few times she had to call my dad to come and help her. After that my father really started to worry about grandma. He feared she might trip and fall down the stairs and nobody would be there to help her. That’s when he decided to put in a stairlift.
I had no idea what a stairlift was so I asked him. He told me a stairlift is just a machine that helps people who have mobility issues move up and down the stairs. He said the chair moves along a metal rail that is installed on the staircase. These rails are designed to fit just about any staircase. After the rail is installed, grandma just sits in this comfortable looking chair and it moves her up and down the stairs. Most new stairlifts run on batteries, so you don’t have to worry about a cable trailing behind that could trip other people walking on the stairs. Many new stairlifts also fold up for easy storage.
Some of the companies that sell stairlifts will even send a professional technician out to your house to install the machine, while others ask that you do it yourself. It usually takes only a couple of hours. But since daddy claims that he’s all thumbs with anything mechanical, he had a man come out to the house and put it in for him. It only took a little over an hour.
Now grandma is moving up and down her old staircase with ease in her new stairlift. She says she loves it that she doesn’t know where she’d be without it. Daddy is happy, too. He no longer worries that grandma might get stuck on the stair or that she might fall on her way down. He says it has given him peace of mind, whatever that means.
