Spasticity

There's something that I haven't talked about on the blog yet that spinal injury sufferers often have to deal with called spasticity.  The muscles that have been disconnected from the brain sometimes get confused and decide to contract or spasm on their own.  It can be anywhere from mildly annoying to kinda dangerous.

When I was in the hospital, I hardly had to deal with any spasticity.  My legs would twitch a little bit, but it was rare and barely even annoying.

Since I left the hospital, and the HO started to act up, my spasticity has gotten really bad.  Any time I move my legs, they will straighten and shake for several seconds.  When I push my wheelchair, various muscles in my midsection and lower back will take turns contracting.  It makes me lean right, left, front, and back at random, and prevents me from pushing the chair until it's over.  When my abs spasm, it feels like a slow-motion punch to the gut.

Just about any time my chair hits a bump, my lower back will spasm and make me lean backward.  This means that if I go outside and try to cross a street, when I hit the bump to climb the ramp to get onto the curb, I lean backward involuntarily.  When climbing a ramp in a relatively tippy wheelchair, this can result in a wheelie followed by a backward fall.  At a minimum, I have to wait until the spasms end before I can push the chair up the ramp and get out of the street.  This is not a good situation, so that's one of the main reasons I don't go outside by myself.

The spasms also sometimes cause problems when transferring from my wheelchair onto other seats.  If my legs straighten at the wrong time, it can throw me off-balance.  That has happened, although it hasn't caused a fall yet.

Another thing the spasms sometimes do is keep me awake at night.  I can't really feel my legs twitching in bed except that they shake the rest of my body.  It's a strange sensation, and definitely not one I can sleep through.  I find that it can get bad when I'm sleeping on my back, but it's rarely a problem when I move to my side.  I don't know what that means, but at least there's a way around it.

Honestly, the spasticity is almost as big a problem as the HO right now, and it makes things that should be boring kinda scary.

It has been suggested to me that my increased spasticity is likely caused by the pieces of foreign bone created by the HO inside my muscles.  It seems plausible that might be the cause, and I hope it gets better whenever they do the HO surgery.  I'm already taking Baclofen tablets to try to help control the spasms, but it doesn't seem to be doing much.  If the spasms persist, it's possible to have a Baclofen pump embedded in your spine, but I'm going to try hard to avoid that.

For now, I think I'm just going to have to deal with it, but I wanted to let everyone know that if you see me lurching around bizarrely, that's likely what's happening.