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This video by TV360 offers you expert advice on spinal cord injury and paralysis.

Transcript

How to Live with Severe Spinal Cord Injury Part 2/2 Larry has suffered a very typical injury for people who developed a Spinal Cord Injury from a dive of accident. What typically happens is that the patient dives into an area that the shallower than expected. They head impacts at the floor of the pool or lake and it like suddenly both compressed and flexed forward. And these causes typically a severe disruption of the ligaments, the bone structures in the neck and causes a sever shock wave to the spinal cord. The Spinal cord is essentially an electrical conduit between the brain and the rest of the body. It’s like a large cable that carries information from the brain down to the muscles in the rest of the body. It tells your muscles to move and receives sensory input from the extremities. Injuries to the spinal cord are usually the result of the sever force to the spinal cord. It’s a very delicate structure. When we look at these injuries at the time of our autopsy, they often times will show sever hemorrhages within the spinal cord, injury to the axons, which are the individual wires in this analogy of the spinal cord, severe bruises and that’s the typical injury we see with the spinal cord injury. We all hope cure as possible. Larry is waiting for a cure but he’s getting on with his life and I think that’s key. I think it’s natural and it’s optimistic and it’s normal to hope and pray for a cure. When it gets difficult is when the patient is unwilling to provide or participate in rehabilitation, waiting only for the cure. We don’t know when the cure is going to happen. We don’t really know when the cure is going to happen. We think it will but its years away. There’s amazing research going on in the field of primary Neural Development, Neural regeneration Robotics and I think all of these eventually will make a huge impact on Spinal Cord Injury patient. But none of these are currently on the horizon for routine clinical practice. I think normal life is really the goal for all Spinal Cord Injuries. Patient who gives up and who doesn’t want to participate in the Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation thinks there’s no hope. It’s not going to do well even if they had the best operation. Most of what we do after the initial injury is dealing with the psychological and the physical rehabilitative aspects of the injury. It’s what really makes or breaks people’s recovery. But in Larry’s philosophy if living for the moment is a very adaptive and what I mean by that is saying it’s a self perception that allows him to be very functional and to really maximize his recovery. Not everybody achieves that level of self perception. It’s very individual. I don’t think we can judge this. Everybody comes to a different realization after a Spinal Cord Injury. It’s sometimes hard to see for those of us who aren’t disabled. But people get used to it. People developed a routine just like we all do and eventually it just starts to feel normal.