Amanda Slade is a client of Steve Burgess, Invacare Australia / New Zealand's Business Leader Customer Power. Amanda wrote this brief account which runs through her thoughts about her journey to finding the power chair that meets her needs perfectly.

"I remember my first Invacare wheelchair. I had an Arrow power chair without tilt at that stage, with a joystick head control.

It had only four wheels and when I went up all hills it would tip back. I prayed it didn’t tip over! Especially when they put a ramp for the physio unit, and the end of the ramp had a small lip. Before I got to the lip there was another ramp made of concrete. I was very nervous when I needed to go up. 

I added tilt on my Arrow and I was up higher, which made the tip worse.

Then I had an Invacare TDX SP with recline, tilt and tilt feet. It has 6 wheels and I felt safe in it because it didn’t tip when I went up hills. It also had switched head array, and I used a head wand which ate into the Head Array cover and into the wires. Every 6 months or year they replaced the control. We needed to change my head wand but the control was still playing up. When the covers got wet from my sweat it "thought" there was pressure and it would move by itself. It was also frustrating when I needed to wait for someone to come and reprogram each of the old chairs, even though they tried to do it as quickly as possible for me.

Now I have a TDX SP2 with a head ASL Proton Head Array. This one works really well for my needs. It does not "notice" if it gets a bit of sweat on it so I'm no longer scared to go anywhere.

I love the chair because I can program it by myself! When I get an error I can send it to Invacare and they can see right away what's wrong. I can use my cell phone through the chair using scanning, and I can go more places outside now because I trust my chair so much."