How the Drive Medical Rollator Made a Hard Part of the Day Easier

The near-fall happened on the concrete in front of our garage, which is the part that still bothers me. Walt had walked out to get the mail. He is seven years into Parkinson's, and his steps have gone short and shuffly, worse when he is tired or thinking about something else. The concrete slopes toward the street. His foot caught the lip where it meets the grass and he went sideways into the Buick and hung on to the side mirror.

He did not go down. I watched the whole thing from the kitchen window with a dish towel in my hand and my heart up around my ears. That is caregiving in one sentence, if you ask me. You stand there holding a dish towel while the worst thing almost happens twenty feet away. That night I dug out the papers the physical therapist had sent home months earlier, the ones with the walking aids printed on them, and I stopped saying not yet.

The walker we landed on is the Drive Medical Rollator Walker with Seat. We have had it about two years. It is not a treatment and it does nothing about the disease itself. What it is, is a steel frame on four 7.5 inch wheels with a seat and a back support that folds up and lifts off. What it does is keep my husband upright and give him somewhere to sit down, and that turned out to be most of what we needed.

I set the handle height where the physical therapist told us to. There is a lever on the frame for it, and it adjusts from 31 inches to 37 inches, with the listing recommending no higher than 35, so there is room to get it wrong and then fix it. The whole thing weighs 20 pounds and holds up to 300 pounds, which is a good deal more than Walt weighs. It has a limited lifetime warranty. I have not had to use it.

The first week, Walt walked to the end of the block and back, and I followed along behind him feeling like a fool and a coward both. The second week he sat down on the seat halfway and I did not say a word about it. Now he does the block most mornings, sits for a minute or two at the corner, and comes back. He does not need me behind him anymore. I go anyway, because I like the walk.

Twenty pounds is nothing until you are lifting it into a trunk twice on a Sunday. I do it, because the other option is one more fall.

I want to say one thing plainly, because I know how the brochures read. This is a walking aid. It is not a cure, it is not a therapy, and it does not slow anything down. Walt still sees his neurologist every few months. His tremor is no better. His handwriting is still getting smaller. What changed is the walking, and the walking changed because he is steadier and because he knows there is a chair traveling with him.

Twenty pounds is real, by the way. I lift it into the trunk of our Buick myself, and I am 66, and it is a workout. If you have a back that argues or a shoulder that has opinions, measure your trunk height before you order anything, because you will be doing that lift every single time you go to the store.

At home it lives in the long hallway between the kitchen and the bedrooms, where Walt does his laps when the weather is bad. It is too wide for our half bathroom door, so it stays out of that room entirely and he still walks that last stretch with a hand on the wall. I am telling you that so you do not expect one piece of equipment to solve the whole house. It will not.

The seat gets more use than I expected, and not for walking. It is for standing up from. Walt is 71 and the getting up is harder than the going, and it helps to have something solid in front of him that does not move when he leans on it. Same reason we ended up with a rail on the bed and a stand assist on the couch. Different rooms, same problem.

The grocery store is where I notice it most. Walt pushes the Drive Medical rollator himself instead of leaning on a shopping cart with both hands and hoping. Sunday mornings we take it to the diner, folded in the trunk, and he walks in on his own two feet instead of holding my arm and pretending he is not holding my arm. Small thing. It is not small.

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

I would tell you to get the one with a seat, which is the Drive Medical model we bought and the reason I am writing any of this down. I would tell you not to wait for the second near-fall. The first one is the warning, and we treated ours like a warning and still waited months, and I am not proud of that. I would tell you to measure the width of your narrowest door and the height of your car trunk before you order, and to have the physical therapist set the handle height instead of guessing at it in the hallway. And I would tell you that Walt grumbled for a week, the same as he did over the heavy utensils, and then he stopped grumbling and started walking to the end of the block again.