Audra was almost 3 years old when she got her first wheelchair. It was a loaner from Poplar Center. It offered her wonderful positioning and much better comfort then the umbrella stroller we had been using, which wasn't very supportive.

Of course my husband and I hated it!

Getting the first wheelchair is always a traumatic event for parents. It is giving in to the possibility that your child may never walk. It changes your life, because from now on every place you go people will stare at you.

We named Audra's first wheelchair Mr. Ortho, short for it being a brand called OrthoKinetic, everytime it sat empty in my home I would walk by it and kick it.

I would glare across the room at this thing that to me made the extent of my child's disability all too real. I hated it, I hated it!@#!

But wheelchairs are like bicyles, kids grow out of them and by the time Audra got her second wheelchair I had come to see the freedom that it afforded her.

She could sit up in it, something she could not do on her own. It allowed her to join in the play with her friends, to go to school, to just get around.

The wheelchair had become our friend.

Audra would go through many more wheelchairs in her life-time, all different types and styles and colors. The pink one was my favorite, I am grateful to the therapist who sent us home with that first loaner chair and I now remember fondly Mr. Ortho and the good times Audra had in that chair. A wheelchair isn't the worst thing in the world it's just a different way of getting from here to there.

Somewhere in a junk heap lies what is left of Mr. Ortho an old but not forgotten friend.