It was 7:42 AM on a Tuesday in March 2024 when my phone rang. The sort of ring that makes you put your coffee down before you've had your first sip.
"We've got a patient in a Permobil M300 stalled in the hallway. The joystick's dead, and they're supposed to be in physical therapy in twenty minutes."
In my role coordinating medical equipment support for a regional hospital network, I've handled 200-plus urgent requests over the last seven years. Rush jobs from a $300 replacement part to a $45,000 imaging component. Last quarter alone, we processed 47 urgent requests and hit a 93% on-time resolution rate. But the calls that scare me aren't the ones I know how to fix. They're the ones at the edge of my expertise—the ones where sounding confident would be the worst thing I could do.
That Tuesday started firmly inside my comfort zone. Call by call, it walked me right to the edge.
7:45 AM — The Permobil M300 manual mode rescue
The nurse on the phone was calm, but I could hear the background noise of a busy corridor. A patient in an M300 with a dead joystick isn't just an equipment issue—it's a mobility crisis. That chair weighs a few hundred pounds with a patient in it. Nobody's carrying it to physical therapy.
Here's what a lot of people don't know about the M300: it has a manual mode for exactly this scenario. If the electronics fail or the battery dies, you can disengage the drive system and push the chair manually. It's not graceful—it takes two people and a lot of coordination—but it gets a person out of a hallway and to where they need to be.
I walked her through it step by step. Find the release levers at the rear drive units. Disengage the motors. Switch the control system into manual mode. She pulled up the owner's manual on her phone while we talked, and we made a pretty solid team. Twelve minutes later, the patient was moving.
"I thought you'd have me order a new joystick and they'd be stuck for a week," she said.
"Joystick might need replacing eventually," I told her. "But right now, manual mode is the fix. That's what it's designed for."
At 8:15 I hung up feeling like a hero. The universe wanted to correct that.
9:30 AM — The Permobil F5 battery that wouldn't charge
The second call came from a home health aide whose client uses a Permobil F5. Battery light flashing six times, cycle repeat. The chair wouldn't charge past 40%, and she had a doctor's appointment in two hours.
I knew the six-flash pattern on that controller—it's a charging fault. Usually it means the battery's reached the end of its service life, or there's a wiring issue between the charger and the pack. The F5's been around long enough that a lot of early units are entering their battery replacement window; the symptoms pointed in that direction. The fault code is documented in the current Permobil F5 troubleshooting guide, which I keep digital copies of for exactly these calls.
But here's where I caught myself. I don't have hard data on how many F5 batteries fail at what age in the field. I know what our call logs show, and I know what other certified techs have told me, but I've never personally rebuilt one of those packs. Telling her to order a replacement battery before seeing the charger output? That's how you end up with a client missing an appointment and a $700 battery they didn't need.
So I gave her the next step: test the charger output with a multimeter, safely. It turned out to be a dead charger—a $180 fix, not a $700 battery.
"Good thing you didn't just tell me to buy a battery," she said.
Yeah. Good thing.
11:15 AM — The CT scanner call that broke my rhythm
By mid-morning, I was feeling pretty good about myself. Then the imaging department called.
"The CT scanner threw an error code and won't restart. We've got patients waiting."
I needed to think about this one carefully.
I'm not an imaging engineer. I know a CT scanner is one of the most complex diagnostic systems in a hospital, and I know that hard error codes can mean tube arcing, detector faults, cooling system failures. But the first thing I knew for sure was: this is not a job for me. I can coordinate logistics, order parts, schedule service. I cannot diagnose a scanner problem over the phone, and trying would probably make things worse.
There's a reason I know that. Back in 2020, I tried to wing it on an imaging equipment issue I didn't fully understand. I gave the radiology team confident-sounding advice, they followed it, and the machine stayed down an extra two hours while I fumbled through a diagnostic flow I had no business touching. The radiology director didn't yell at me. She just said, quietly:
"Next time, maybe call someone who knows."
It was one of the most useful conversations of my career.
So this time I did the right thing. "I'll get you the service line and contract number, and I'll have a parts specialist standing by. But I'm not going to touch this one clinically. Let me get you to the imaging team."
What surprised me was how grateful she sounded. "Thank you for not making me guess. Our last coordinator tried to fix a power issue himself and it became a three-day service visit."
I know that guy. He's a version of who I used to be.
1:30 PM — The ostomy bag request that humbled me
After lunch, a nurse from the rehab unit asked about ordering ostomy bags for a patient. Sounded simple enough at first. Supplies, vendor lookup, order placed. No problem.
Then she started asking real questions. Did our suppliers carry one-piece or two-piece systems? What about convex flanges? Barrier rings? Adhesive removers? Skin-safe options?
And I realized I didn't know anything about ostomy care. Straight up. Ostomy bags aren't just "bags." There's a whole clinical ecosystem around them—skin barrier sizing, flange types, wear-time considerations, whether the patient self-manages or needs a caregiver. Ordering the wrong product can mean the difference between a patient living a normal life and developing painful skin complications. That's not a supply-chain decision. That's a clinical decision.
"This isn't my area," I told her. "I can source general medical supplies, but ostomy care needs a wound care specialist. Let me connect you with ours."
She laughed. "You're the first person on this chain who's said that without a pause. Usually people say 'we can handle it' and then I have to babysit them through the order anyway."
That was the moment the day's pattern clicked for me.
2:45 PM — "What is robotic surgery?"
The last question came from a surgical department administrator.
"What is robotic surgery? I've got a surgeon asking about it, and I need to understand it before I talk to a vendor."
Robotic surgery is a genuinely great question. Surgical systems let a surgeon control tiny instruments with far more precision than a human hand, and the technology keeps evolving. But there's a big difference between explaining the concept and understanding what it takes to run a robotic surgery program: surgeon training, OR infrastructure, sterile processing workflows, credentialing. It isn't a machine you plug in.
And I honestly couldn't answer her beyond the basics. I know the equipment side, or I could find out anyway. But the clinical reality? That's a conversation for a surgeon or a surgical educator. Explaining it myself would have been less than half an answer dressed up as a whole one.
So I said: "I can tell you what I know about the equipment. But if your surgeon is asking the question, the person you want is someone who runs one of these programs. I'll connect you with the team that handles surgical tech in our system. They live this every day."
She paused. "Good. The fact that you just said 'ask someone who knows' tells me I can trust you on the stuff you do know."
Bottom line: that's the reputation I've spent seven years building.
What that Tuesday taught me
I've thought a lot about that day. It could have gone the other way so easily. I could have answered the robotic surgery question with four paragraphs of hallway knowledge. I could have told the imaging department to restart the CT scanner and hoped. I could have ordered a case of ostomy bags and let someone else sort out whether they fit the patient's actual needs.
But here's what I've landed on: in a health system, everyone is a specialist. The mobility equipment person knows their chairs and batteries and manual modes backward and forward. The imaging engineer knows their CT scanners. The wound care nurse knows their ostomy patients. The surgeon knows their robotic systems. The people who add the most value are the ones who know which room to send you to.
"I don't know" isn't a confession of weakness. It's an honest map of where your expertise ends—and it saves everybody time.
I wish I'd learned that on day one. I actually learned it in 2020, at the cost of two hours of radiology downtime and a quiet, devastating sentence from a director who had every right to be frustrated. I've been practicing it ever since, every time I resist the urge to sound like an expert in something I'm not.
One more thing: everything in this story was accurate as of mid-2024. Medical technology moves fast, and even wheelchair fault codes get revised in firmware updates. If you're troubleshooting a current system, verify everything with a certified technician and current documentation before taking anything apart. I've made enough mistakes to know what humility looks like—which is also why I know the release lever positions on a Permobil M300 by heart. That's my lane. And I've got great people to point you to for everything else.
