BREYDON’s wheelchair trials: Karma Ergo Lite 2

Purchased new from a rehabilitation shop. The people on staff encouraged me to buy the chair in a much bigger size than I needed.

My first chair of my own, and still relied upon as of March 2021. Although it has been a life‐saver, I cannot get around in it anymore and it was not really appropriate to begin with.

It has had a turn at everything from holding me up while I wait for the microwave to finish, to solo international travel with great strings of transit connections. I have used it to board and disembark a variety of buses and metros and suburban trains and intercity trains and international trains and big airliners; and stowed it in cars (with the chair in collapsed form) and vans. This chair has taken me through snow, into mud, in grass, among cobblestones, on skateparks, up and down steps, along smooth streets in fine weather in some of the flatter urban neighbourhoods of cities like Melbourne, Sydney, London, and Paris… even across carpeted rooms and through polished halls. The Ergo Lite 2 is honestly — at this point — one of the best chairs I have ever used, but it was suited to none of these things. Incredibly labourious. In motion, it would feel like my body’s frame and the chair’s were in a continual clash.

People pushing it have found it very tiring, too. Places like downtown Newcastle (New South Wales) or villages in the Dandenongs proved absolutely beyond it, but so does just about anywhere. The Ergo Lite 2 did, however, in its heyday, make pretty nice lounge seating.

• Karma Medical, ‘Ergo Lite 2’. https://www.karmamedical.com/product/km-2512/, accessed March 2021.