Showers in accessible cabins?

[Moonstoners]

Just curious how you've handled using a shower in an accessible cabin. I'm assuming that bathtubs aren't available in most of these cabins, but our son can't get out of his chair, and I've heard that the shower stalls are TINY! Any suggestions would be appreciated

[Ken]

Our son cannot transfer either. We just give him sponge baths in bed during the week and use an inflatable hair wash basin. Our only other choice would be to carry a shower chair which does not seem practical for several reasons. Our experience with the showers has been that they are typically very large. There should be plenty of room for his chair if you wanted roll him in.

[DEL67]

The accessible cabins on most of the newer ships have large roll-in showers with pull-down seats and bars. The showers in the accessible cabins on the Splendour are not as large because it is an older ship, but they still are larger than the showeres in the regular cabins and have hand-held nozzles. In addition, my memory is that they are also roll-in with pull-down seat.

[Splinter]

How do you do it at home? Do you use a lift or do a transfer of some sort? How are you transferring in/out of bed?

 

My mother cannot stand at all, and we take a mechanical travel lift. We don't like the shower stools provided by the cruise lines (usually do not have a back) and the wall-hung ones are also precarious if you don't have good balance. When we get on the ship I go up to the pool and "steal" a deck chair with armrests. For showering I transfer my mother into this chair in the roll-in shower using our lift and she feels much more secure. Before we had the lift I did this using a "quad pivot" transfer (which is possible, but dangerous for you).

 

This will be our first trip taking our own rolling shower chair designed for travel. We got the one advertised at http://www.rolli-moden.com for a great price on eBay. We will be able to use this for both showering and to replace the raised toilet seat we used to take, and it packs up in a very small package. A good investment for us.

[guardhouse]

On our last cruise on the Dawn Princess, we had a VERY large roll in shower (4'x4') that had bars all around and a large pull-down seat. Had a curtin that came all the way around. No problem at all.

[kyriecat]

I noticed from another post that you are on the Splendour, which is a sister ship to Rhapsody. I was on it last week with my mom, who is in a wheelchair. If you have a designated handicapped cabin, the shower (and bathroom) is bigger than normal. My mom could roll into the shower easily then transfer to a bench in the shower. There are rails in the shower to grab onto, like those in handicapped restrooms. She sat on the bench and used the hand-held shower head (it also had a clip to hold it in place for those who didn't want to hold it) to rinse off.

 

She was in cabin 2602. The cabin was very roomy (plenty of space to wheel around the bed and look out the window). They also had a refrigerator in the room, which is not standard. The downside was they didn't have as much closet space as we did in the normal cabin next door. The cabin was approximately twice the size of the normal cabins. That might vary, dependinig on cabin type.