ONE of the most important concerns when you have an ailing elderly or a physically challenged loved one in your care is bathroom safety. How often have you heard of someone having a mishap while in the bathroom?
This is a topic that has been commonly discussed, especially when a patient is discharged from the hospital after being injured in such situations. Sadly, we often put in those required fittings only after an incident.
Let's change that scenario now. Let's do something before anything happens. In fact, even if there aren't any ailing loved ones at home, do it for yourself. Make it a standard fitting for everyone because accidents and disaster knows no age.
You'll thank yourself for having the foresight of installing things like grab bars in the bathroom and staircase. It'll certainly come in handy for those days when you're feeling unwell and groggy, whether it's from flu or when your knees or hips are "misbehaving" and your joints are hurting.
Firstly, install the grab bars. Towel racks are not grab bars. They may look like a useable grab bar but they're not strong enough to support a person's full weight. They're made for supporting light things like towels and clothes. Should you ever make the mistake of trying to balance yourself by grabbing the towel rack, you may cause grave injuries to yourself.
PROPER INSTALLATION
When you find someone to install the grab bars in the bathroom and at strategic places around the house, ensure that the installers know what they're doing. Alternatively, you can consult them and go to every point to test it out according to your height and requirements.
This means going around the house with the installer and actually sitting on the toilet seat (fully clothed, of course) to get the right height where you're most likely to put the pressure as you stand. Putting the bars too high or too low can hurt you too.
The same goes for when you're putting bars to haul yourself out of the bathtub. You'd want to get the best position, height and angle for that. If you don't believe how important this is, try using it at some hotels. It makes you wonder what they were thinking when they installed those bars.
Next are bars or handles at your staircase. If there's anything that irritates me, it's having finger marks or hand streaks on the walls of the stairwells. People tend to use the wall as a support in addition to the rails, especially when going down the stairs.
When the children were smaller, they'd leave such trails that also consisted of food from improperly or even unwashed hands. I'd wipe those walls so often that you could see a streak that's lighter than the rest of the walls. This annoyed me too and I had the whole walls repainted with oil paint, which was easier to wash and should've have lasted longer.
When that too wore out over time, I'd put wallpaper just to cover that bit. That worked too but only up to a point. By that time, my eldest son Omar who's physically challenged was the biggest contributor to the stained walls.
He actually had to hold both the rail and the wall to support himself going up and down the stairs. So, we decided that a strong and continuous stainless steel bar was the solution to this. The solid bar worked like a charm! We should have installed it way back when!
EASE THE PAIN
Now that steel bar at the staircase is a godsend for all of us, especially when I'd hurt my ankles and knees at the various stages of my life due to sports injuries. With these injuries, I also discovered that you could do with certain extras too. One of them is having anti-skid material for the bathroom floor.
We sometimes think we've chosen the best tiles for our bathrooms when they're being made. Little do we realise that sometimes that's not the case. You'd find that just a bit of water could make you slip. You may not fall but that jolt is enough to pull some muscles and give you pain.
If your shower cabin is as slippery as your bathtub, you might do well to put some anti-skid material there too. One of the things you may need to put near those areas would be towelling floor mats that are absorbent. However, do be careful with these because they could potentially be slippery or they could trip you. So, choose the fabric carefully.
Another one to consider is the toilet seat. Some toilet bowls made today can be a bit too low that it would hurt you as you try to sit and then stand. If you're installing a new one, ask your contractor to raise it by a few centimetres to suit you.
Alternatively, buy one of those portable toilet seats and just put that frame on top of it. It may not be pretty to look at but it certainly does the job to ease your pain.
[The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.]
Putri Juneita Johari volunteers for the Special Community Society of Ampang. She can be reached at [email protected].
