#Spinal cord injury

[gayaest]

[OC] Saad 🍰🍨🍫 (description in alt-text)

[plague-parade]

happy disability pride to all of my fucked up spine havers

happy disability pride to those of us who have spinal cord injuries, degenerative disc disease, ankylosing spondylitis, scoliosis, kyphosis, lordosis, spinal arthritis, cauda equina syndrome, tethered cord syndrome, spinal fusions, stenosis, myelopathy, radiculopathy, spondylolithesis, craniocervical instability, spina bifida, spinal tumors, syringomyelia, and anything else spine related

we are so very cool and i love you all so much

[crippled-peeper]

how ablebodied people look at me after telling me they’d violently kill themselves if they had my disability

[valcaira]

Shoutout to paralyzed people. Those with complete paralysis, incomplete paralysis; Those whose paralysis was caused from accidents, brain injuries, strokes, spinal cord injuries, neurological illnesses; Those with paraplegia, quadriplegia, hemiplegia, tetraplegia. Who were born paralyzed or became paralyzed later in life.

Those who have a carer, those who use a wheelchair full-time, those who use crutches or canes and those whose mobility aid is a hospital bed. Those with incontinence, who wear adult diapers, ostomy bags and catheters. You are not "lesser" for needing care or not being able to live independently. You deserve to live a comfortable life with autonomy and dignity.

We rock. We're fucking amazing. I love you.

[anfisawheel]

[putra-paraplegic]

[reasonsforhope]

"It’s long been supposed that implants could connect prosthetics to the brain in a way that stimulates nervous system commands with electrical signals.

Now, this idea is closer than ever to realization in a meaningful way, as one man paralyzed from the hips down is able to walk unsupported, even up stairs, thanks to such electrical nerve stimulation.

The patient, Gert-Jan Oskam, lost all movement in his legs after suffering a spinal cord injury in a motorbike accident. After using a precursor technology to gain back a little bit of mobility, Oskam enrolled in a proof of concept study to perhaps make further advances...

Now, with an implant in his brain, when Oskam thinks about moving his legs, it sends a signal to a computer he wears in a backpack that calculates how much current to send to a new pacemaker in his abdomen. It in turn sends a signal to the older implant in his spinal cord that prompts his legs to move in a more controllable manner. A helmet with antennae helps coordinate the signals.

The scientists developing the technology and working with him detail that he can walk around 200 meters a day, and stand unassisted for around 2-3 minutes. Once, Oskam details, there was some painting that needed to be done, but no one was around to help him. With the new technology, he simply took his crutch and did it himself.

Incredibly, after less than a year, and completely unexpectedly, scientists believe the technology closed the gap in his nervous system, and he can now lift himself out of a chair, and even walk with the help of a crutch, even when the device is turned off.

The scientists are planning in the future to work with patients with paralyzed arms and hands, and even with stroke victims, as the “digital bridge” is a massive advancement in nervous system stimulation technology."

-via Good News Network, June 16, 2023. Video via NBC News, May 24, 2023

[genderqueerdykes]

i just had the worst fucking cluster headache of my life, i could not function OR rest for about 3 hours, i was just sitting in various spots of my apartment like this >_< while trying to find the darkest spot i could, alternating between trying to sleep and trying to just sit there.

trying to sleep made it worse, somehow? i eventually was able to in the end but for several hours trying to sleep made the pain throb and stab. i took some seroquel and that was able to help me sleep but i could not open my eyes for the life of me, nor could i keep them shut for too long. my right eye / back of my head just hurt like hell for no reason for 3 hours and at several points i just kinda whined and cried a little because there was not really much i could do drinking water didnt help. i ate food, that didnt help

that sucks ass. if you deal with these too, im sorry. people trivialize headaches all the time, but this one resisted an extra gabapentin, which helps with migraines and headaches, and i was still unable to do anything but deal with what was happening. there are a lot of different types and manifestations of headaches. if someone tells you they're experiencing a bad headache, please let them do what they need in order to get through whatever they're experiencing

[mindblowingscience]

In a new study in mice, a team of researchers from UCLA, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and Harvard University have uncovered a crucial component for restoring functional activity after spinal cord injury. The neuroscientists have shown that re-growing specific neurons back to their natural target regions led to recovery, while random regrowth was not effective.

Continue Reading.

[bpod-bpod]

Growing Nervous

Regeneration after damage of the central nervous system is limited. This study finds that suppressing activity of a gene called Lipin1 leads to significant regrowth of sensory and motor nerve axons (the signal-transmitting projections) after spinal cord injury

Read the published research article here

Video from work by Weitao Chen, Junqiang Wu and Chao Yang, and colleagues

Biomedical Research Institute, Shenzhen Peking University–The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Medical Center, Shenzhen, China

Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), September 2024

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[latinawheels]

Throwback to 3 years ago. Feeling sexy in bralette and black fishnet pantyhose

[gayaest]

A lot of his personal PTSD reactions involve irritation and anger! He doesn’t know a lot about disability culture and community until he meets other disabled people during paravolley practice!

[cupcakes-n-rainbows]

Using mobility aids is not "setting myself up to fail in my own fantasy." I am not giving in or giving up.

When I say I don't ever see myself without my wheelchair, I'm not giving up. I'm looking up at the future with sparkles in my eyes, watching it all unfold on the movie screen in my mind. And in that future? I'm disabled. I use a wheelchair. I have paralysis. I need help. And in that future? It's beautiful and it's amazing and it's fun, and it isn't hampered or dampened or lessened in worth by four wheels instead of two feet. It's just my future. Yes, it's different than that of an able-bodied person, but everyone's future is different, wheels or not. The help I need and my form of mobility doesn't make my life or my future any less wonderful.

Please, hear me and know me and understand me. Please, listen and truly take it to heart when I tell you that this is my future and this is my life. Not the hope you had for me when I was seven or how I danced when I was ten. That naive child left years ago, locked somewhere within the depths of my mind. She won't be back. I'm not her anymore. I'm not the same as I was, and I never will be.

My story isn't a tragedy. I'm not "too young". I'm not "too smart". I'm not throwing away my "bright future". This is my bright future. This is me, through and through and up and down, forwards and backwards and right and wrong.

Please. Let me live on my wheels rather than die on my feet. It's all I ask.

[crippled-peeper]

hi 👋 can anyone help me pay these copays…. I am drowning in debt currently and I won’t hear the ruling on my disability case until later this winter :( check my bio for more info about me if you don’t mind

thank you so much 🖤💖

[whatshouldwecallchronicillness]

Me trying to read my MRI images...

[foxglove-garden]

Being chronically ill is fun because my right leg is numb and the right side of my lower back and hip are in a huge amount of pain and I don't know if I dislocated something, if I aggravated the spinal cord injury I had when I was a kid, if I aggravated the fracture in my tail bone that I got in Spring/Summer of '22, if it's nerve pain from my Lyme disease and related palsy, or something completely new!

Also this is a fun time to not know where my fucking cane is! Usually it's in the car, but our car was totaled in August and I don't know if I rescued my cane from it after the crash.

Fuck my life, I can't fucking walk today.