Posts Tagged ‘bio-mechanical’

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Able Bodied

January 3, 2022

I have one term left at the school of Advanced Bio-Mechanical Rehabilitation. I will write about graduation soon; for now I wish to talk about the difference between being disabled and able bodied. This is, essentially, a transition that I must make at graduation and I will talk of the bio-mechanical aspects of this. I spent the first 28 years of my life in an able bodied body and then, all of a sudden, found myself without so much function that I lost comprehension of what it is to be able bodied. I am then confronted with the question as to what makes one able bodied. Most consider this as the ability to walk, with the ability to perform bodily functions as a second thought, while, in my experience, bodily functions are the first that must be regained. They are intrinsic and it is within intrinsic structure that we must seek the answers to what makes us able bodied.

I am so far from walking and yet feel so close to being able bodied. For too long I lived with catastrophic collapse of the entire body while, at the same time, suffering paralysis from the waist down. Not only was there no hope of regaining the use of my muscles, while in such a condition, I also had little understanding of where hope lay. For nearly five years I wandered in the darkness until I met a gentleman who taught me various eternal truths of the body. I learnt to understand that the structure of my body is not dependent upon the lack of ability to use muscles and so I came to see that the structure of my body could be dramatically improved …..and that’s what I’ve done, over approaching 21 years!

Whereas once I was dead weight, from the waist down, now I have so much levity, from the transformed structure of my head, neck, shoulder girdle, chest and even pelvis, that my entire body has life in it to some degree. Now I can hold my head high, in a purely structural sense, and have so much capacity down to the chest that I’m working on the finishing touches to the structure from the waist up. A little more drawing out of the back, a little more strengthening under the shoulder blades and a little more stitching under the rib cage and I’m pretty much there. The waist down has always been a different story, and in some respects that has not changed, although, even there I have engineered such structural improvement that I truly feel connection through the hip joints and have flow right down into the feet. I no longer live with worry that the flesh of a little toe may start breaking down.

My pelvis has woken up to such a deep level that I’ve embarked on a new phase of regrowing my damaged pelvic floor and left bum cheek. I still want a cushion, but the increased flesh on my bum and the massive improvement in the strength of the lumbar sacral junction, together with greater volume to the pelvis, has resulted in being able to sit so comfortably. To be able to relax, in stature, with no regard for consequences, as those consequences will never be too great, is much of what it is to be able bodied.

Understanding how much disabled people struggle, with the ability to simply be in this world, goes a long way to understanding disability. I’m so flourishing in my ability, to simply be, that I hope, soon, to leave the world of disability behind.

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Workout

April 5, 2021

I went for a walk with a friend the other day in the Nower in Dorking; it’s public woods and grassland. We used to go sledging there as kids so as you can imagine it’s on the side of a hill and not very wheelchair friendly. I enjoyed the walk (or wheel), enjoyed the company and it was great to be trekking around my old stomping ground again. At the end I was exhausted and it was remarked that I’d had a good workout, but was it really good for me?

Gazebo at the top of the Nower

If I did it too often it wouldn’t be good, but now and then does me no physical harm and worth it for the other benefits, although to think of it as a workout would be wrong. In terms of improving my physical condition there is absolutely nothing to be gained by struggling in a wheelchair. To overcome paraplegia you have to be a lot cleverer than that. When my body was terribly depleted, physical exertion was definitely counter productive in terms of ingraining the changes and further deforming the body. In the few years after injury (before the ABR years) I did much damage in taking my body in the wrong direction and much time and effort has been invested since to reverse this. These days I am much stronger, and more capable, while at the same time I am more sensitive and tuned in to the counter productive nature of using my body beyond its limits and I tend to shy away from such activity.

When you live in a body with insufficient structure to support certain functions it is important to improve that underlying structure rather than struggle with function that abuses the already weak structure. The work we do is all about improving the underlying structure through external mechanical inputs, building it up to the point where function becomes possible. Only then, once the functional ability is achieved, does a workout become sensible. Such an approach should not only be adopted by the severely disabled, but also by the significant number of able bodied people who find themselves out of shape.

We get many joggers down our lane. The occasional one is in good shape and it’s a joy to see a body so capable of effortlessly moving at speed, although for most it is painful to watch their misguided attempts to improve their fitness. The other day there was a women with a distinct weakness at the lumbar sacral junction. Instead of a strong trunk supporting the pelvis and allowing true articulation at the hip joints, the hips were rigid and the body twisted at the waist with every step. The inputs into the body, from the reaction of each step against the ground, could ascend no further than that weakness and could only build up bulk around the already immobile hips. I see many joggers with hunched up shoulders, and head sunk down into the body, locking up the weakness in the neck and shoulder girdle in order to gain the stability to support the lower trunk and legs. Again no inputs can work up into the weakness, it’s too locked up.

One day I’ll teach people how to strengthen their structural weaknesses and get in shape to the point that they’re then in a position to jog with ease and have the capacity to build up their fitness.

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Cold

February 25, 2021

Fortitude is a word you rarely hear these days. Maybe we are all so mollycoddled by the wonders of our technological civilisation that we have little need to find the fortitude in us. Fortitude being ‘strength of mind that enables a person to encounter danger or bear pain or adversity with courage’. This winter I’ve been without a Rayburn which is normally the background heat throughout the cottage, that wonderful warmth when you enter through the back door into the kitchen, lashings of hot water and a great way of cooking. I’ve always enjoyed real log fires to keep me warm when sitting indoors, an open fire in the front room where I conduct my therapy sessions and a wood burner in my cosy living room. This year, though, that’s all I have. The Rayburn finally bit the dust at the beginning of winter and the reconditioned one that’s being made to order will not be delivered until 11th March. Last week was exceptionally cold, with temperatures barely rising above freezing, and it’s taken considerable fortitude to live comfortably, and a good store of well seasoned logs of course.

The great thing about living with the cold is that, not only does it take a strength of mind (or spirit), but in finding the fortitude to embrace the cold you find yourself imbued with a ‘strength of spirit’. My bathroom is a poorly insulated extension and although I am managing to maintain a slight background warmth throughout the rest of the cottage, the bathroom is absolutely freezing. Stripping off to take a wash takes fortitude and yet by rising to that fortitude I find myself all puffed up against the cold, easily attaining to a wonderful stature.

One of the most interesting things I have read about diet and nutrition was Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on the subject. He pointed out that if you eat meat your body is given the blueprint for manufacturing its own meat. If, however, you eat a vegetarian diet then your body does not have the luxury of the blueprint and so has to work harder to build and maintain your own meat. The interesting part was his statement that in working harder there is more strength to be gained, although he did point out that you have to be strong in the first place to live without the blueprint. Was he talking about gaining physical strength or a strength of spirit. Maybe the two are intrinsically connected, but either way I can draw parallels with living with the cold. It takes strength to live with the cold and if you can find that strength then you also find there is strength to be gained.

I grew up with central heating and never cared much for it, I always found that radiators gave a muggy kind of warmth, while many friends grew up with houses on the chilly side and a coal fire in the front room. You hear stories from people my age and older about how cold their houses were as a child and yet none of them seem to have suffered and maybe quite the opposite. These days people often sit in their houses in winter wearing no more than a t-shirt and I’ve good reason to think that, as a nation, we are getting softer. Not having a fire and a warm room to relax in would be unbearable and I’m looking forward to my new Rayburn for next winter. For the time being though I am rising to the challenge and enjoying the strength and vibrance that finding fortitude gives me. Even when I have my new Rayburn I won’t stop loving the great outdoors and will always embrace the cold and will never be too mollycoddled by the wonders of civilisation.

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Climbing a Mountain

October 8, 2020

I haven’t written a blog post for a whole year. I didn’t feel I had anything new to say. I even sat down in February and got half way through writing a post only to give up. I was just repeating myself. I’d said it all before and was relating what I was saying to yet more small improvements in the head, but that’s just it. What it takes to heal a body, from such a catastrophic injury, is one small improvement after another. Advanced Bio-Mehanical Rehabilitation, as the way of therapy I work with is known, is not a miracle cure, and there are no miracle cures, just steps in the right direction. Each step is nothing more than a tiny incremental change, but if you take enough small steps you can climb a mountain and climbing a mountain is exactly what you have to do to overcome the physical effects of a spinal injury.

Paraplegia is considered a permanent condition and without dedication to a way of healing it will be. I talked in November 2017, in a post entitled ‘Competitive Co-Operative’,about spinal injury being about far more than the loss of muscular function, due to nerve damage, and that there is enormous collateral damage; structural collapse that fails to recover naturally and overtime the changes become ingrained in the body and, if we are not careful, permanent. The cells of our body are constantly replenished and I am led to believe that every seven years we have an entirely new body with every cell being replaced over that period of time. Those changes will be replaced in the same ingrained fashion, unless we encourage the body to return to balance, as it replaces its cells. By delivering repetitive mechanical inputs, into the system of the body, we can encourage that return to balance as the body’s replenishes itself.

By the very nature of the work we are undertaking, it is a long slow process, although I find it incredible that the improvements, however slow, creep up on you so that now and then you suddenly realise how much you have changed and how far you have come. It would be nice to think that those who have known me throughout my rehabilitation notice these changes, bearing in mind that over the last twenty years we have radically altered the structure of my entire body to the point that I barely resemble the paraplegic I once was, and there are some who do. However, there are others who seem to forget just how bad a condition I was once in. I met someone at a funeral earlier this year who asked me if I was still doing the therapy and whether it was working. I looked down at my body and thought, ‘Can’t you see!’.

There’s a guy who drinks in my local pub, whom I haven’t know for long, who on hearing about my therapy work wanted to know more. I gave him the links to my website (www.spinalroots.net), blog (www.spinalroots.blog) and film (www.spinalroots.uk) and on seeing him the following week was impressed with how much he’d looked into it. He realised not only the enormity of the physical improvements, but the extent of the life journey I have undertaken. He’s inspired me to talk more about the psychological aspects of overcoming such an injury, realising that you can’t begin to heal a body without also healing the mind. So maybe it’s time to go back to the beginning and tell the story from a different perspective.

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