My name is Susana, and I live in a mountain village near Barcelona. In 1999, when I was 16, I had a car accident that caused a complete spinal cord injury at the T8 level.
At that time, there weren’t as many specific products on offer as there are today. For permanent wheelchair users, it was more difficult to access information and new products, so I spent my first few years using a gel cushion that was extremely heavy and didn’t offer comfort or good sitting posture.
I’m a very active person and always try to do new things that can help me lead a healthy life and discover new activities. One of the things that always caused me problems was the cushion I used. It was an air cushion, and since I did a lot of transfers and some activities were in the mountains, the cushion frequently got punctured. Another problem was trying to fully clean the cushion, which always ended up covered in dust on my mountain hikes and had to be cleaned by hand.
It’s never easy to change something you’ve been using for more than 20 years, but with the Vicair Active O2, I had no doubt that the change was for the better.
Although I was familiar with the Vicair brand from seeing it on colleagues and in orthopedic stores, I had never tried it. I was able to try the Vicair Active O2 cushion at a trade show and was fascinated. The correct position and the security it gave me immediately after trying it impressed me.
I currently use the Vicair Active O2 for my daily life and for my padel wheelchair, and the Vicair Vector O2 for all the activities I do with a manual or electric handbike on forest or uneven terrain.
I think it’s a fantastic advancement to be able to put the cushion in the washing machine and ensure it’s completely cleaned without leaving any dirty corners, as happened with other cushions. And the ability to replace the cells if one punctures has given me minutes of life that I used to waste repairing my other cushions.