|
FAQ13: What's the best "life vest" for a laryngectomee?
The ideal lifevest for larys is ... Sorry. It does not appear to exist at this time. I have been thinking about communicating with a lifevest company for awhile and seeing if they might design one for us. There are not that many of us, so the market is limited. However, maybe a company would do it for PR reasons, or maybe one of the big ones would do it because they already have a line of specialized, low volume sales models. An ideal lifevest for larys would put more buoyant material under the arms and chest area below the stoma. What we would want is for our stomas to be lifted as far out of the water as possible without our tipping over. So it is a "balancing act". If you put buoyant material too low on the body it would tip you over. The heavier duty lifevests for non-larys puts more flotation material around the neck, which does us no good. We need it lower. Picture something which would work like an inner tube in keeping you higher and drier than standard life vests, but be less bulky than an inner tube. A combination of a thin water sking vest around the chest area combined with a standard lifevest may do the trick for now until the ideal one is designed. One lifevest which occupies minimum space until inflated is called SOSpenders. It comes in models which inflate automatically. Here is the address: http://www.sospenders.com Regards, : )o David Blevins, Email: [email protected] |
