Always Be Prepared As A Wheelchair User

One thing we have learned with all our travels is to not panic. Another thing is that it's important to surround yourself with the right people. Last year, we made a big decision to go with Alliance Rehab and Medical Equipment instead of NuMotion for Kimberly's powerchair. We had been with NuMotion for almost 20 years, but were tired of their subpar customer service. Alliance promised a more personal touch and they won us over.

I can give all the gory details of this story, but I'll keep it short. The day before we left for this trip, Kimberly's chair started giving us hints that its batteries were going bad. In Albuquerque, it was confirmed. I had no idea how we were going to fix this problem so far from home. I knew we couldn't panic; worst case scenario, we put Kimberly's chair into manual mode and push her around. This would have been really dreadful due to how heavy the chair is combined with the location we would be in, Vegas. However, sometimes you just got to do what you got to do. I did reach out to Alliance to ask what we should do and the call center gave me a number to some hotline that might be able to help. That number didn't work. So I contacted Parker Fadler, the technician that was hands on in getting us Kimberly's chair. He suggested calling the two national companies in the area, one of them being NuMotion, to see if they could help. That was a dead end. NuMotion said that it would be weeks before they could provide us with batteries and we would have to pay our of pocket for them. So I called Parker back and he let me know that he knew someone in Vegas that might be able to help. He soon got back to me with a contact in Vegas and said they would have batteries waiting on us! I couldn't believe it, especially after having so much trouble with the larger companies. I reached out to the contact,Josh Wolmes, and we worked out a time for us to meet and get the batteries replaced. I cringe to think about what our trip would have been like without the new batteries! A big thank you to Alliance Rehab and Medical Equipment, Parker Fadler, and Josh Wolmes!