Crip's Column - View from my wheelchair - Victoria Brignell on life as a disabled person.

There's more to paralysis than not being able to move. Victoria reveals the hidden medical challenges faced by people with spinal injuries

Paralysis is rather like an iceberg. The bit you can see, the not-being-able-to-walk palaver, is just the tip. Suffering a spinal injury has a number of other effects on the body which most of the time remain hidden from public gaze, but which can be just as difficult to come to terms with.

My name is Jason I live in the Uk and have suffered with severe urine infections for over 16yrs.

My condition is a spinal cord injury patient due to a road traffic accident 16yrs ago and I have suffered immensely with these retched urine infections ever since. I’ve tried various methods to stop these infections from drinking 10 pints of water daily to taking cranberry juice and tablets and nothing could stop these horrible infections but antibiotics.

 (adapted from September 2005 “Paraplegia News” article)
 We are a part of a global community in which the devastation of spinal cord injury (SCI) bows to no flag, and solutions will not be any country’s exclusive domain. Integrating the diverse pieces of the puzzle necessary to develop real-world solutions requires that we open-mindedly work in cooperation and not in competition. With such cooperation, restored function after SCI will be a coalescing reality and not just a never-ending, elusive pie-in-the-sky dream. 

In this spirit of bridge-building, I recently traveled to Moscow, Russia where I became the first American scientist to check-out an innovative stem-cell program for SCI developed by the NeuroVita Clinic under the direction of Dr. Andrey Bryukhovetskiy. His work is especially important because few scientists have accumulated as much hands-on experience as he has in treating human SCI with stem cells, an approach many experts believe will play a key therapeutic role in the future.

Eric Coffman, of Denver, was a 19-year-old Colorado School of Mines student when he damaged his spinal cord snowboarding in 2001.

He flew to Israel to get experimental macrophage injections. "I was the fourth person to ever have it done," said Coffman. "They told me it might take a few weeks or a few months to see if the injections had done some good."

Melissa Holley, the first person in the world to get macrophage injections for a spinal cord injury, is a believer.

"I can't ignore the fact that I've gotten so much back," said Holley, 22. "I'm very excited about (the procedure) coming to Denver."

Most people begin by telling some tragic story about paralysis. The tragic part often happens after the injury.
During high school, I had a teacher who had been injured in Viet Nam. He taught marketing, computer skills and much more about life. He was someone you could just sit around with and kick the bull. Very rarely did he talk about what he'd been through but you just knew it was a lot. When he did reflect back on those days it was kept very brief and it was something you respected.