When I broke my leg, they gave me a walker before I left the hospital.
After a couple weeks, I was ready to graduate to a cane. They said it was going to take at least a couple weeks to process all the crap to approve one for me. So instead, I found a very fine four-point cane at the first thrift store where I looked, for about three or four dollars. If I needed a walker, there were plenty of those, there, for a similar price.
The real prize, for me, in mobility devices, was almost a year later. I was working in a thrift store (through some program where I was given light-duty work for a charity, while being paid by my regular employer as if I was doing my usual construction work) and a couple of knee scooters came in. This was at a time when the original fix to my broken leg was failing, and I was preparing for surgery to repair it. The better of the two knee scooters was a Knee Rover All Terrain, which got priced at $25. MSRP on this model, new, is about $400. With my 30% discount for working there, that $25 became $17.50.
Alas, for the great deal that I got on it, I didn’t really get to use it much. That was actually my last day working before the surgery, and by the time I returned to work two weeks later I had recovered enough not to need it, or even a cane.
I think my only use of it to go anywhere away from home was to a medical appointment, where the doctor, on hearing what I had paid for it, expressed amazement at the deal that I had got. I hadn’t really thought much about what it was likely to cost new, until that meeting, and it was after that that I tracked down the manufacturer’s web site, and looked it up there. A $400 knee scooter, and I paid less than 1⁄20 of that for it.
Thrift stores can be really neat that way. That isn’t even the best deal I got from that particular store, during the time I was working there. That would probably be my Haix Airpower XR1 boots for $7.