How to Get Out of a Car With a Sore Knee Using a Car Cane

I know the moment I am talking about. The car stops, everybody else is out and standing on the sidewalk, and you are still in the seat doing arithmetic. Which leg goes first. Is the door open far enough. Is this knee going to hold when it takes my weight in front of people I know.

My left knee was replaced four years ago, and for a while getting out of a parked car was the hardest thing I did all day. The driveway at home I could manage. It was the church parking lot, the grocery store, the curb outside the doctor's office, anywhere I had to get out quickly and look like a normal person doing a normal thing. My husband Gene has his own trouble, a weak right hip and balance that comes and goes, so some Sundays we were both stuck in that car, laughing at ourselves because the alternative was worse. What changed it was small and not very interesting to look at. The EMSON Car Cane is a short steel handle, 8 inches long and 2 inches wide, 16 ounces, that drops into the U-shaped latch on the car door frame and gives you something solid to push down against. We bought the two pack eighteen months ago. One lives in the passenger door pocket for Gene, one in the driver door pocket for me. This is the order I do it in, step by step, and what I would want you to know before you try it.

First, What a Car Cane Actually Is

It is not a cane. That confused me at first. A cane you lean on while you walk. A car cane is a removable grab handle that sits in the door latch, the same metal loop the door clicks into when it shuts, and gives your hand a place to push from while you get up out of the seat. You put it in when you park and take it out before you close the door. Mine has never once been used for walking.

The EMSON version is ambidextrous, which means the same handle works in the driver door and the passenger door and in either hand. It also comes with a built in LED light, a seatbelt cutter and a window breaker, batteries included. I will be honest with you about those three in a minute.

How to Get Out of the Car, Step by Step

Step 1: Ask Your Physical Therapist, Then Check Your Door Frame

I am not a doctor or a physical therapist and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Dana is my physical therapist and she is the one I ask before I change anything about how I move. When I brought the car cane up, she was in favor of it with one condition: use it to push, not to hang. That distinction is most of this article, and I will come back to it in Step 4.

The other half of step one happens in your own driveway. The handle slides into the striker latch on the door frame. Our four-door sedan has one on each front door, so we use both canes. Not every vehicle has a latch in a spot the handle can reach. Some have covered latches or trim in the way, and sliding doors on a van are a different problem entirely. Take the thing out to the car and set it in the latch before you rely on it anywhere, and check with your therapist before you start using it at all.

Step 2: Park So the Door Opens All the Way, and Set the Handle Before You Unbuckle

Parking is part of the skill and nobody tells you that. I take the far corner of the lot where the door can swing all the way open and there is no cart return beside me. A door that only opens halfway is worse than no handle at all, because you end up twisted sideways trying to get the cane seated in the latch.

Then comes the order of operations, and this is the part I would tattoo on the dashboard if I could. Handle first, seatbelt second. I set the EMSON into the latch, press down on it once to feel that it has settled, and only then do I unbuckle. It takes about three seconds and it is the reason the rest of it works.

One hard rule. The car cane is for a parked car. Not while the door is still swinging, not while the car is creeping forward in the pickup line at school. A door frame is not a handrail when the door is moving.

Step 3: Slide to the Edge of the Seat and Put Both Feet on the Ground

The old way, the way that hurt me, was to swing one leg out and then try to stand. That leaves you pushing up out of the seat with the sore knee doing all the work, and it is exactly the motion a bad knee does not want. Instead, slide forward until you are at the edge of the cushion, turn your whole body toward the open door, and set both feet flat on the pavement with your knees roughly over your feet.

Gene does this differently because his trouble is balance, not a knee. He plants both feet, takes the handle with his left hand since that is the side away from his right hip, and does not begin to stand until he feels both heels down. Dana showed him that a couple of years ago. It took him about a week to stop rushing it, and he still rushes it when he is in a mood.

Both feet down also tells you something before you commit any weight. If the pavement is uneven, or the curb is right there, or there is a puddle, you find that out while you are still sitting down. The seated position is the safest place to find anything out.

Step 4: Push Down Through the Handle With Your Arm, Not Your Knee

This is the whole trick and it is the part people get wrong. The instinct when you want to stand is to lean forward and drive up with your legs. A car cane gives you a knob to push down on so your arm can take the load instead, which buys your knee a few seconds of not being the one in charge.

Grip the handle with the hand closest to the door frame and put your other hand on the seat cushion or the dashboard. Straighten that arm and push down through it, deliberately, while your body comes up. The knee stays under you rather than out in front. Dana's phrase for it was arm first, leg second, and I still say it to myself in parking lots four years later.

The grip on the EMSON is soft and nonslip, which sounds like a small detail until you are wearing a winter coat with wet cuffs and trying to hold on to something. Because the handle works in either hand, we have swapped ours between doors more than once and never had to think about which one belongs where.

Step 5: Stand, Count to Two, Then Step Away and Put It Back

Once you are up, the temptation is to turn and walk immediately, and that is when I have come closest to trouble. Stand still and count to two. I skipped it once in the church lot on a July morning and had to keep a hand on the car until the world stopped rocking.

Then take the handle out of the latch, close the door, and put it back in the door pocket where it lives. Ours never ride loose in the console or under the seat, because a steel bar sliding around near the pedals is its own separate problem.

Now the honest part about the extras. The car cane has a built in LED light with batteries already in it, a seatbelt cutter, and a window breaker. In eighteen months I have never needed the cutter or the breaker and I hope that stays true for the rest of my life. I do use the light, now and then, to find the keyhole in the church lot after Wednesday night rehearsal when the lot is dark. That is the true version, not the brochure version.

What It Won't Do

I want to be straight with you, because I have read a great many product pages that were not. The car cane does very little for getting into the seat. Getting out got easier in the first week. Getting in stayed awkward for a good while and I had to learn that separately, mostly by backing up to the seat and sitting down before I turned my legs in.

It is a handle on a door frame, not a railing. It is rated to support 350 pounds and that rating means something or they would not print it, but rated support is not permission to hang your whole weight on it sideways while you dig for keys with the other hand. One hand, deliberate downward push, stand up, let go. It also will not rescue you on a bad day. On a bad day I use the rollator, and that is not a defeat, that is just Tuesday.

What Else Helps

The canes are not the whole story, and I would be doing you a disservice to pretend they were. Gene and I have a Drive Medical rollator that lives in the garage, a HurryCane he uses every day, a bed bar on his side of the bed, and a reacher grabber that hangs by my kitchen door. Of everything we have bought, the EMSON Car Cane is the pair that gets used every single day without anyone thinking about it, because we get in and out of the car more often than we do anything else.

Two practical things about the car itself. Park facing out when you can, so you are not reversing into a lane of traffic with your neck twisted. And give yourself permission to get out before you gather up your purse, your jacket, the casserole dish and the mail. I used to try to do all of it at once with one hand and that is how I ended up on the pavement in 2022.

The other thing that helped was not a device at all. I stopped apologizing. For about a year I would get out of that car and say sorry to whoever was waiting, sorry, sorry, I am slow. Gene finally told me to quit it, and he was right. Nobody at church is standing there timing me. Mostly they are talking about the choir schedule.

The bigger change was pride, if I am being honest. I did not want a handle stuck in my car door. It looked like giving in to something. Eighteen months later it looks like a piece of equipment, the same as a step stool or a good pair of shoes, and I would rather have it than have a story about the day I fell.

Eighteen months, two canes, one in each front door, and the church parking lot is no longer the hardest part of my Sunday.