Treatment wheelchair

The Treatment wheelchair is the recurring clinical and practical object through which Rose Papastergiadis’s fluctuating mobility becomes visible. It carries her through the Gómez Clinic, is sometimes set aside or missing, and later travels with her beyond the clinic into the crowded landscape of Almería. It does not settle what Rose can or cannot do: instead, its changing use places dependence, pain, care, and moments of unexpected walking in uneasy proximity.

Clinical Introduction and Use

At the Gómez Clinic, a nurse waits with a wheelchair and pushes Rose along the marble corridors while Sofia Papastergiadis follows. For Sofia, handing her mother over to the nurse is a relief: the chair temporarily transfers some of the physical work of care to clinic staff. The nurse’s brisk, pain-free stride contrasts with the slow, shared pace Sofia has adopted outside the clinic, where she limps alongside Rose. The wheelchair thus enters a scene already organized around different bodily speeds and different kinds of attachment.

The chair also frames Rose’s first encounter with Gómez. When he offers his hand, Rose leans forward as if to accept, then withdraws; Sofia shakes his hand on her behalf. Rose is present in the chair, but the gesture makes clear that her presence does not mean consent or trust. The chair helps bring her into the clinical encounter, yet it cannot speak for her or resolve the guardedness between patient and doctor.

Gómez’s examination gives the encounter a concrete medical focus. He asks Rose to leave her shoes on the floor while he examines her right foot, finding two ulcers, one area slightly infected, and asking whether she has been tested for diabetes. He says the infection must be attended to immediately. Later, he discusses reviewing her medication and asks which medicines she is attached to and which she might give up. The wheelchair places these examinations and treatment decisions within a visible scene of impaired movement, but it does not itself explain the cause of Rose’s symptoms.

An Unsettled Measure of Mobility

The wheelchair’s presence does not establish a consistent level of capacity. At one point, Rose has walked to a restaurant with Sofia and Gómez, but the journey is difficult: she trips over pistachio shells left in the village square. Sofia has spent an hour sorting out the laces of Rose’s shoes, and a nut no larger than a large pea brings her down. The contrast between the effort of walking and the later use of a chair resists a simple division between able and unable. Small details in the route and the preparation matter to how movement is managed.

During a later consultation with Julieta Gómez Peña, Rose looks for her wheelchair, which seems to have vanished from the room. She is speaking about the pain in her feet and says that getting rid of them would bring relief. Julieta helps align Rose’s head, then leads her back to the chair after a porter returns it, balancing a newspaper on its armrest. The chair’s brief disappearance interrupts the clinical scene at the very moment Rose is describing her body as intolerable. Its return restores a practical means of sitting and moving, without answering her demand to have her feet removed.

Rose’s changing access to the chair also sits alongside changing accounts of what her body can do. At the market, Sofia lifts a wheelchair from the car boot and pushes Rose over hot tarmac toward stalls beneath a plastic awning. Elsewhere, when Sofia invites Rose to stand while she folds and stacks the chair in the boot, Rose says she cannot stand that day. The chair must be handled, carried, folded, and positioned according to the demands of each outing; it is not merely a symbol but equipment around which practical decisions and labor gather.

Care Work Beyond the Clinic

At the market, the wheelchair carries Rose through a scene of ordinary commerce and sensory detail: churros with chocolate, anise liqueur, grapes, onions, cheeses, salamis, spices, tools, and chickens turning on a spit. Sofia navigates the dust road and its potholes while Rose swats flies landing on her feet with a rolled-up copy of the London Review of Books. The chair enables Rose to be there, but the outing depends on Sofia’s effort to lift, push, steer, and attend to her mother’s needs. Rose’s mobility is therefore shaped not only by her body but by the labor and conditions that make movement possible.

The chair also makes the pace of care tangible. Sofia can be pushing Rose through one setting, then preparing to fold the wheelchair and load it into the car; Rose’s capacity, meanwhile, varies from one occasion to another. Sofia observes that she sometimes catches herself limping, as if her body has remembered the way she walks with her mother. The wheelchair belongs to this shared rhythm: it can carry Rose when walking is difficult, but it does not remove the effects of caregiving from Sofia’s own body or memory.

Change and Significance

The clinical and practical record surrounding the chair remains unresolved. Rose tells Sofia that Gómez knows little about chronic pain and that her pain has not yielded its secrets; she also reports that her feet are numb rather than painful on one occasion. At a review meeting, Gómez explains that Rose had been dehydrated and treated with intravenous saline, and that difficulty swallowing water also makes it difficult for her to swallow medication. These details connect mobility with broader problems of pain, hydration, and treatment, without making the wheelchair a diagnosis or a cure.

In the beach scene, Rose is no longer being pushed. Sofia sees her mother, aged sixty-four, walking alone along the shore in a sunflower-patterned dress, holding a hat. Rose continues toward the shower ramp, and Sofia later finds and marks her footprints in the sand. That sight does not erase the earlier scenes of wheelchair use or establish a permanent recovery; it reveals that the chair has never told the whole story of Rose’s mobility. Across the clinic, the market, and the beach, it records a changing relation between bodily capacity and assistance, while the final footprints preserve a moment of movement that Rose makes for herself.