Sask. mom says 4-year-old daughter left waiting for weeks after WestJet broke wheelchair
CBC
A mother is still reeling after her daughter's wheelchair was broken on a flight, and says her child had to crawl out of the plane on her stomach and didn't have access to a wheelchair on her trip.
"The whole thing was very frustrating," said Sarah Turnbull, who has been struggling to get answers from WestJet since the incident in early October. Since then, her daughter Blake — who has spina bifida and is paraplegic — has been without her own pediatric wheelchair.
"They weren't kind, they were derogatory, they broke our mobility devices, and there's been no support."
Turnbull said the problem began when she, her daughter, her son, her mother who is also an intermittent wheelchair user, and her father arrived in Toronto.
The family normally disembarks last, due to their mobility issues. Turnbull said she had left her children with her mother to go get her daughter's wheelchair, which has to be reassembled after being stowed away.
She said the wheelchair was broken, with a rim bent and therefore unusable. As she was trying to fix the issue, her two-year-old son ran out of the plane.
"Then my four-year-old who can't walk is crawling … off the plane on her tummy. And then finally, my mom comes with her cane off the plane," she said.
"And my mom says that they were forced off the plane and that they called my daughter a salamander."
The cleanliness of the airplane floor became a concern for Turnbull, as her daughter had open surgical wounds at the time. Then there was the insult. Turnbull said her understanding is a captain saw her daughter wriggling on the floor and had asked, likely as a joke, if she was being a salamander.
"My daughter's wonderful. I don't think she's aware of it, to be honest. So we don't talk about it around her, but like, on top of everything else, they went and said derogatory stuff about my daughter."
Turnbull said she attempted to get the wheelchair fixed during their stay in Toronto, but the damage was too much for a quick fix and the company was unable to provide them with a usable loaner.
"While we were in Toronto, she didn't have full access to her wheelchair," she said, noting that her daughter is normally quite active in her chair, loving to dance and move. Losing her pediatric wheelchair is a big loss, Turnbull said.
"That's like taking someone's legs. That's her mobility."
When they arrived in Regina, repairs to the broken wheelchair were put on hold for two weeks while parts were ordered, pending approval from the airline.
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