My Injury

The fact is, I don't know too many details about my injury because I don't want to know yet.  I'm worried that the more details I know, the more gently I will want to treat the injury during rehab, so instead, I'm going to try to stay somewhat ignorant, and trust the rehab therapists not to let me do anything dangerous.

What I do know is that I have a severe injury near my T4 vertebrae due to the vertebrae being moved out of alignment, and that a surgery was performed to fuse some of the vertebrae together for strength and put them back into alignment.  Damage to the nerves that make up the spinal cord mean that signals from my brain are stopped around arm-pit/nipple level.  I cannot feel or move anything below that level.

Fortunately, I have more or less complete use of my arms.  That's a huge positive in this situation, and they say it means that I will eventually be able to regain almost complete independence.  It's hard to imagine right now how I'm going to get to that point since right now, I can't even sit up on my own, but for now I'm willing to trust that it's true.

The biggest things holding me back right now are the other injuries I sustained in the crash, and the leftover pain from the surgery.  My left hand/wrist feels like it is sprained or could have a small fracture in it somewhere.  It makes it difficult to put weight on it when trying to learn how to do things like sit up in bed or move from the bed to the chair.  And I aggravated some of my broken ribs laughing at some of my friends last weekend.  That has been extremely painful this week whenever I have to lay on my side or roll over, but it seems to be getting better.  I'm using a little bit more percocet than usual to deal with the pain, and the fun I had last weekend was completely worth whatever price I have to pay this week.