The Day I Finally Let Gene Try the Rollator

For eleven months I offered Gene the folded rollator in the corner of our garage, and he walked past it every single day. I had offered it maybe a dozen times. Gene is 74. His right hip has been unreliable for a few years now, and he would rather sit down on a bench halfway to anywhere than be seen pushing something with a seat on it. I understood that better than I let on. About four years ago my left knee finally quit on me after all those years of rec league softball, and I fought the same fight, and I lost it in worse ways than he did. The Drive Medical rollator in that corner was mine first. It took me a while to be honest about that.

I bought it the week before my knee replacement, on the advice of Dana, my physical therapist. She did not sell it to me. She asked me one question I did not like, which was what my plan was for the three months when I could not carry anything across a room. I did not have a plan. What I had was pride, and pride does not hold a coffee cup while you are hopping on one leg. So I ordered the Drive Medical rollator. Steel frame, 7.5 inch wheels, a seat, a back support that folds up and lifts off, and a listed weight capacity of 350 pounds.

For the first three months I used it every day, mostly in the house, which is not a friendly house for a healing knee. We have a two story with the bedroom upstairs and three steps up to the front door, and every one of those steps was its own decision. By month four I was walking the neighborhood loop, about half a mile, with one rest on the seat halfway around. By month six I did not need it indoors anymore. Now it lives in the garage. I want to be clear that my recovery went well and that not everyone gets that. I was lucky and I know it.

Gene's situation is different in a way that matters. His hip was never replaced and fixed. It hurts and it tires, and there is no surgery on the calendar. For a long time his answer was a cane, and he is genuinely attached to that cane. He carries it in his left hand, opposite the weak right hip, exactly the way Dana showed him, and it is the reason he stopped stumbling in the driveway. But a cane is not a place to sit. At the farmers market, at the fair, at anything past twenty minutes on his feet, a cane asks him to keep going after he is already done.

Which brings me back to the thing in the garage. I had been offering it for months. He had been declining it for months, politely, mostly by changing the subject to the weather. So I stopped pushing. That was the right call and it was also the hardest one I made all year.

We got halfway around the fairground, by the sheep barns, and his hip simply quit on him. I walked back to the car and got the rollator out of the trunk.

Fourteen months ago, at the county fair, we found out where his line was. We had been there about an hour and we were maybe halfway around, near the sheep barns, when his hip quit. He did not fall. He stopped, put one hand on a fence post, and got very quiet, which is what he does instead of complaining. I walked back to the car and lifted the Drive Medical rollator out of the trunk. It took me two tries because it weighs 20 pounds and I am 5 foot 4 with one good knee. That weight is the one complaint I will make about it out loud.

He looked at it for a second. Then he took it. He sat on the seat by the sheep barns for four or five minutes, stood up, and we finished the fair. He used it the rest of the afternoon. On the way out he said he wished he had done this an hour earlier, and if you know my husband you know how much that cost him. The Drive Medical rollator has gone on every long outing since. The farmers market. The fair. The zoo with the grandchildren.

One thing we had to work out is that it is one rollator and there are two of us. Gene is 5 foot 10 and I am 5 foot 4, so the handle height is different for each of us. There is a lever on the frame for exactly that, and we reset it each time we swap. It takes a second. The back support folds up and lifts off too, which mattered more than I expected, because he likes it and I do not, and we stopped bickering about it the week we realized it comes off. The seat is the whole reason this works for him. Resting is the point, not a bonus.

Now the honest complaints. It is 20 pounds and it is heavy going into a car trunk, and my shoulder feels it. It is not a walker. If someone is truly unsteady and needs to be caught when they go, this is not that, and they should be asking their doctor about a walker instead. The 7.5 inch wheels handle pavement, gravel and fairground grass, but a bad sidewalk crack will still stop you, so watch the ground ahead. And Gene would never have picked this himself. It had to be within reach before he would consider it, which meant it had to already be in the trunk.

Both of us use it now, which is not how I pictured any of this. Mine is the knee. His is the hip and the balance. Two different problems, one piece of equipment that happens to cover both. Dana's only note was that we should each set the handles for our own height and that we should not treat the seat like a porch chair. That seemed fair. I am not a doctor or a therapist and I do not play one at the kitchen table, so ask yours before you change anything.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you were across from me right now with a cup of coffee, here is what I would say. Do not buy this for someone who has not agreed to use it. It will sit in a garage and it will turn into a thing you argue about. Wait for the afternoon when they are tired and they say so out loud, and then have it close by, already assembled, handles set to their height and not yours. Ask their doctor or their physical therapist first, the way I asked Dana, because balance is not something to guess at and I am not qualified to guess at it. And do not expect it to fix a hip or a knee. It does not. What it does is give a person somewhere to rest so they can keep going, and on a good afternoon that is enough to get you all the way around the fairground and back to the car.