Ouch! That had to hurt...

I spend some of my spare time, ok that means most of it, tooling around looking for more information on spinal cord injuries. Not just mine, all kinds of injuries. It is amazing what can happen to your spine and how it may end up effecting the rest of your body.

I watch a show called Trauma Life In The E.R. on T.L.C. and several weeks ago they had an episode on a spinal cord injury called internal decapitation. The boy in the story is the one that was also the focus of the show I saw. It is amazing at what happened to his spinal cord and what the doctors were able to do for him. While he may never be the same as before the accident, he is alive.

Many people do not realize that some spinal cord injuries can and do kill. Each vertebrae correlates to a nerve root and those nerve roots obviously control the separate functions in our bodies. Injure the right ones and your lungs will no longer work. Like I said, it is truly amazing what goes on with the spine. The spine is made up of several segments called the cervical, thoracic, lumbar and sacral. From those vertebrae run 31 nerve roots, the nerves that carry all the messages from the brain to the body or vice-versa. To better understand where each nerve root runs from and what can happen if their is damage to the vertebrae or disc I have found the diagram below. It can explain much better then I can what each does.





The spine is perhaps one of the strongest and at the same time most delicate areas of the human body. More interesting is that some people can go through life with some serious deformities or even injuries to the spine and never feel or suffer from the effects of it. Then there are others who have a slight injury accompanied by severe pain. You will find that even doctors who deal with spinal cord injuries all the time are very cautious about how they treat the patient and when they will actually release a patient.

While some problems with the spinal cord can be operated on with great success there are some injuries that there are just no hope for. Obviously I have dealt with both sides of the coin. Oddly the injury that caused the most damage is not the one that put me down. While it did leave me with some screws and rods as well as fusion, I was on my feet when the second one hit. Why and how we are not sure but it is basically nothing more then some scar tissue which has developed and it is kicking my ass, literally.

Like I said, it is interesting how the spine works.