I totally lost it yesterday afternoon.

I had a screaming fit in the driveway while Banjo Man leaned on his rake and looked very, very worried.

You see, I was in the midst of dragging the new lightweight transport wheel chair out of the back of the SUV while shrieking that I was going to throw it down the hill and beat it to death on the rocks.

Banjo Man put his rake down and intervened before the destruction began.  I think he said something like, “What the hell happened?”

I had just arrived home after a very intense, very upsetting three hours with said wheel chair, my 91-year old mother and a trip to a urologist’s office (which, by the way, had a broken heating system and was at least 100 degrees).  The hand brakes on the new chair that Banjo Man had nicely assembled for me that morning were so stiff that they were practically unusable.  It took everything I had to operate them, and I had to operate them every time my mother needed to stand up or sit down or get out of the car or get into a car (which was a lot of times, let me tell you).

A concerned onlooker in the office waiting room told me, “Something’s wrong.  It’s not supposed to be that hard.”

Which made me feel better.

And made me want to beat that chair into a metal pulp.  I burst into tears instead, shortly after Banjo Man rescued the chair from destruction.   Then I stomped upstairs to my computer, filled out the return form on Amazon, told Banjo Man not to bother to try to fix it (one of the reviews said the brakes could not be adjusted) and crawled into bed.  Fully clothed.  With a box of Kleenex.

As I wrote on the Amazon return form, you’d have to be an arm wrestling champion or a Navy Seal to operate those brakes.  And I am neither.

It has been a very long week.  I guess something had to snap eventually.

I will have to buy another chair, and soon.  But I’ll think about that tomorrow.

Or maybe Monday.