How the Medline Shower Chair Made a Hard Part of the Day Easier

For about six months, the part of the day I dreaded most was the ten minutes after breakfast. That was shower time. Walt has Parkinson's. He was diagnosed seven years ago, and for a long while the shower was the only thing he still handled completely on his own. Then it stopped being that.

It was not one bad fall. It was smaller than that, and in some ways worse. He started rushing. Standing under the water he would wash and rinse and be out in four minutes flat. I asked him why he was hurrying. He said he did not want me standing there watching him wobble. That is the thing about this disease. It takes something from you, then it takes your willingness to admit you need help.

We tried the cheap fixes first. A plastic stool from the hardware store that slid an inch every time he shifted his weight. A bath mat with suction cups that peeled up at one corner inside a week. A towel on the floor. None of it inspired confidence, and confidence was the whole problem.

About eighteen months ago I ordered the Medline shower chair. It is aluminum, which matters in a wet room, and it holds up to 350 pounds. It arrived in a box and I put it together at the kitchen table while Walt pretended not to watch from his recliner. Twenty minutes, start to finish, with the step-by-step manual that came in the box.

The first thing I noticed was how light it is. Seven pounds. I can lift it out of the stall with one hand to scrub the floor underneath, and I do not have to wait for one of the kids to visit.

He went from four-minute showers back to normal ones. Not because the tremor got better. Because he finally had something solid under him.

It adjusts to six height positions. Ours is set so the seat sits at 21 inches, which is about where Walt can lower himself down without dropping the last few inches onto it. That mattered more than I expected. A chair two inches too low is a chair he has to fall into.

The arms and the back are padded, and the back is contoured, so he can lean back when he is tired instead of holding himself upright the whole time. The contoured back is the other thing the plastic stool did not have. He can lean into it between rinses. The padded arms are the reason he can get out of it on his own. He plants his right hand on the armrest, pushes, and the chair stays put. On a bare arm, his hand would slide.

The feet on the Medline chair are rubber and slip-resistant, and they grip the floor of the stall. It has not walked an inch on him in eighteen months. That was the whole failure of the plastic stool, and it is why I stopped buying the first thing I saw on a shelf.

I will tell you what it does not do. It does not stop the tremor. He still needs me within earshot, and on a bad morning within arm's reach. It measures 16.3 inches wide by 13.4 inches deep, and in our stall that is comfortable, but I measured the stall before I ordered because I was not going to wrestle a box back to the post office. The padded seams collect soap scum and need a wipe down every couple of weeks.

It also came with a one-year limited warranty and a manual that reads like a person wrote it rather than an engineer. That is not nothing when you are the only one in the house doing the assembling.

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

First, check with the neurologist or the physical therapist before you buy anything. I am not a doctor and I am not going to play one over coffee. Ours was the one who suggested adaptive gear in the first place, and she was right about the order to do things in. The shower chair came before the bed rail, and she was right about that too.

Second, take a tape measure to the shower. Not the bathroom. The stall. Five minutes with a tape measure saves you a return and a week of wondering whether you ordered the wrong thing.

Third, buy the boring one. I wanted something that looked like it belonged in a hotel. What I actually needed was something that would not move while my husband pushed himself up off it. The Medline chair is not pretty. It is steady, it is light enough for me to move on my own, and it has a back on it, which the stool did not.

The Medline chair has been in our stall for a year and a half now. Three or four showers a week. He washes himself and I stand in the hallway with a towel and pretend to be busy. That is the part I did not expect. It gave him back a few minutes of privacy, and it gave me back a few minutes of not watching him wobble.