Scootin' away
Well, it finally happened. Last January 7th I finally got an appointment with the VA physical therapy group. My doctor had been recommending that I get a mobility scooter because of the damage to my skeleton. He felt that being more independent would be good for me too. So he made the recommendation and a few weeks later I got the summons to get fitted for a scooter.
The guy interviewed me and studied my medical chart and explained that I qualified on every level. So he whipped out a catalog and pointed out the mobility scooter he felt would best serve my needs. It looked ok to me, although I was a bit worried that it might be too slow. Anyway, he said he would get the order in immediately and I should expect my scooter in three weeks. That would be February 1st.
Well, February first came and went, and so did a week. Since it had been a month I figured I would call and see what the holdup was. The holdup was that no one turned in an order for the scooter until February 3rd. They told me it would be three weeks before I could get a scooter.
A month later, on March 6th, I called again to ask what was happening with the scooter. This time I was told that they had accidentally ordered the wrong scooter and they had to ship it back. It would be another three weeks before I would get my scooter.
Why, I don’t know, but I lost my temper. I explained that I would just as soon not have the scooter awarded to me posthumously. I also explained that I was headed for Seattle and would be needing the mobility there for certain, and what were they going to do about it? If I had no mobility I could not go for treatment and if I didn’t go for treatment I would not be getting necessary medical care.
They thought about it a while and decided to give me a scooter from their stock. Stock? They had scooters all along but were ordering more and making veterans wait in spite of already having what was needed. But I held my tongue and went in to pick up the scooter before a meteorite struck it or it was stolen by aliens.
When I got there, an older gentleman was asking what the status was for the ramp they promised him. He had bought a van, gotten a scooter, but they were supposed to get him a ramp so he could put the scooter in the van. Turns out he’d been waiting for four months for his ramp. In the end, they told him it would probably be another three weeks.
But they did cough up a scooter for me. Then they trained me on it, which is to say they showed me where the throttle was. Then they tested me to make sure I could drive the scooter. Of course, for the last half hour I’d been driving the scooter and following the tech around as he went through his process. But wonder of wonders, I passed the scooter operating test and we loaded it into the trunk of the car. I made sure we left immediately, just in case someone might come running out of the building to tell me that it was a mistake and I needed to wait three more weeks.
There’s no question that the Veterans Administration is running on a short budget. The nation doesn’t consider vets enough of a priority to insist that the government fund it sufficiently I guess. I don’t know how else to explain the lack of funding.
But a lack of budget doesn’t explain procrastination and careless operations of needed veteran services. Here I was complaining because it took over two months to finally produce a scooter, yet here was a gentleman who had his scooter for a quarter of a year but couldn’t use it because staff members kept on forgetting his ramps. The ramp he needed was a fifty dollar item. Not a big deal in the grand scheme, but it was important to him.
The VA has a lot of growing to do, but in this case I think it could easily shrink by a few employees and no one would notice a difference.
