Legion helps bring wheelchair course to Tampa VA

To the average person walking down a sidewalk, a steep curb, gravel or uneven slabs of cement are inconsequential. To a wheelchair-bound person, these things can be the difference between access and impediment.

With this sentiment in mind, volunteers from The American Legion and Home Depot's Team Depot met last week to construct a wheelchair slalom course at the James A. Haley Veterans' Hospital in Tampa, Fla. The outdoor course, which simulates the various inclines and bumps in the road that wheelchair users face, figures to help patients at the facility learn how to use their wheelchairs outside of the hospital setting.

"Out in our community, access is more difficult for a wheelchair user than an able-bodied person," said Michael Firestone, lead physical therapist in Haley's spinal cord injury department. "If you are not around wheelchair users, you don’t even see it. We walk right past things that we don’t even realize are obstacles for them. Having some of these obstacles built for us is really going to help them.”

Volunteers from the Legion and the nearby Home Depot store assembled last Thursday to build and paint the course, which features all shapes of bumps, a gravel pit to simulate road construction, and a set of ascending and descending steps that teaches wheelchair users how to negotiate stairs when no ramp is available.

As an added perk, the course is an exact replica of the obstacle course used at the National Veterans Wheelchair Games. Veterans at the hospital, like Army veteran Stephen Bush, will be able to use the course to practice for the upcoming games.

“Some obstacles are every day obstacles and some are obstacles that you may encounter but not every day," said Bush, a past participant in the games' obstacle course. "You learn to, instead of going around the obstacle, to kind of go through it."

In addition to supplying manpower, the Legion helped facilitate the project by helping to arrange a grant from the Home Depot Foundation to the hospital to fund the course. Volunteers from the nearby Home Depot store, led by store manager Rebecca Muldoon, helped lay out, construct and paint the course on their own free time.

“It’s important for me to do this and I think for the rest of the people who are here," said Harry "Butch" Brown, a Navy veteran and Team Depot volunteer. "It's important to give back to these people who have sacrificed so much. Not only for the people who are confined to a wheelchair but also for their families."

The course also gives the patients a much-needed excuse to get outside from the stale hospital environment, Firestone said, and also a chance to relive some of the competitive spirit that they enjoyed in the military.

"Being in the military, there is that competitive nature in a lot of (the patients)," Firestone said. "They are here at a time when maybe their minds and bodies are healing, and they are trying to wrap their minds around their injuries. Giving them something competitive sometimes helps to bring them out of their shells.”

Wheelchair games aside, Bush says the course's biggest value comes in the confidence that it will teach to wheelchair-bound patients.

"It gives you a sense of confidence because in the hospital environment, everything is typically smooth and flat and even, but when you are rolling down the sidewalk, the sidewalk isn’t always straight," he said. "Do you go around the obstacle or bounce over it?... These are obstacles you face every day."