Driving Evaluation

I had my driving evaluation today. How exciting!

I stopped driving back in November when my legs pretty much stopped working. Well, I could shuffle along on a walker, but I couldn't lift my leg to put the foot on the brake, for example. Luckily son Bob has been available to drive me to work and back, which is the only place I really needed to go. And friend C helped out by driving me to doctor appointments.

I finally decided to stop waiting for my fairy godmother to show up any day and sprinkle dust on my head so I could miraculously start driving again overnight. So I inquired about getting hand controls for my RAV4. This is how it works: you contract with a driving school to have a driving evaluator come pick you up in a car that has alternative controls. They take you out for a couple of hours and evaluate your needs, and if it looks like you might be able to function capably, they make recommendations to an installation place. You take your car and get the equipment installed, then the evaluator comes back and certifies you in your own car.

This is all a bit pricey, but as we know life isn't easy, let alone cheap.

My appointment today was at 11:00. I got up at 7:00. In the world of the crimpled, it takes a long time just to get dressed and make it look like your hair was combed. Four hours was more than even I needed, but I knew it would take a couple of cups of tea to get the blood pressure up to human level. At 10:30 I started outside. I wanted to tackle the front steps by myself. I have been doing the steps OK for a while, but someone else takes the walker down or up. Today I did the steps and the walker by myself. And I didn't just stand at the top of the stairs and kick it down, I actually figured out a civilized way to do it. And yes, it was scary. But just as I reached the end of the sidewalk, here came the driving guy.

He came striding out of the car with a big smile, "Hi, I'm Darryl and I'm your driving instructor, do you have dogs that bite? who owns the Hodaka 90? I love it out here, I'm bipolar. What's your handicap? I have something wrong with me that makes me paralyzed for a month at a time but they don't know what it is....blah....blah....blah. 30 minutes of blah. Definitely a social personality. That was OK, it gave me some time to sit in the car and doodle with the controls. Finally Darryl got in the car and explained them to me. He had the car pointed toward the highway. I said, "I'd rather drive out in the fields for a while first, if you don't mind."

So for another 30 minutes we drove around the Christmas trees on the gravel roads. Hand controls are not easy. The brake and the gas are on the same handle. Push back to stop, pull down to accelerate. You have one hand on the steering wheel and one on the control all the time. To use the turn signal, you have to take your hand off one of these.

I decided right away that my right foot works well enough to handle the gas pedal, and it does. So when the gravel roads got dull, I decided to drive on the creek levee for a while. This actually made Darryl very quiet. Well, so the thing is only one lane wide and you can fall off both sides. Also Darryl had just washed his car and there were mud puddles. It wasn't too bad, though, until we got almost to the end where the road merges back into gravel and fooey! a drainage ditch had been cut right through the track. So I had to back up all the way on the narrow road with drop offs on both sides.

Darryl became VERY quiet at this point. He stopped telling me about his book, about his abusive parents, about his 28 pills a day for bipolarity.

But hey! no problem. The only problem I did have was coming down off the levee, I pushed on the lever to brake and got the gas instead. I said, "hit your brake! hit your brake!" (because the instructor has one, you know) and it took him a while to figure out I was talking to him. It would have been no problem, we were only heading for an empty field and were going pretty slow. We would have just needed to call for a tractor to pull us out. But he uncurled his toenails and stopped us in time.

The hand control is sort of like the accelerator on a motorcycle. You know, if you have to hang on and accelerate at the same time and don't watch the angle of your wrist, you can overaccelerate (isn't that right Aunty Mo?).

Then we made a sidetrip to Dairyland Seed so Darryl and John could talk Hodaka for a minute or two before we hit the highway.The highway wasn't too bad, except that Darryl is very paranoid. Whenever I would go exactly 55 and some speedball was right on my tail, Darryl would hit the emergency blinkers and get them to back up. And for the whole trip he told me tales of horror from the highway, what can go wrong if you do this or that. Luckily for Darryl I understand only too well people who are over-rooted in reality. Some call them pessimists, I see them as realists.

When I get the car converted, you can believe that I'll be out in the back 80 on the gravel roads, trying stops and starts and things that require coordination. I still don't see how you use the turn signal when your hands are already busy. There is a long thingy they can attach to the turn signal that makes it stick out further, but you still have to use your hand to trigger it.

I have some volunteers to help me get back and forth to work, and I think I'll stick to that for a while. For one thing, it will give me a chance to visit with someone different every day. For another, I am really not ready to do the stairs by myself yet. Someone suggested a ramp. According to specs, it would have to be 30 feet long. Sounds more like a skateboard park to me, and could be even more exciting than the stairs.

I'll let you know when I finally do hit the road so you can all stay off it for a couple of weeks.