Tag: Spinal Cord Injury

Matt Hampson – Engage

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Matt Hampson’s Foundation provides rehabilitation facilities for seriously injured young adults, employing physiotherapists and other specialists to help people reach their potential. The Foundation’s website has an online shop where, among other things, you can purchase a copy of Matt’s biography Engage, co-authored with journalist and ex-Tour de France rider Paul Kimmage.

Matt himself is a survivor, and some. As a 20 year-old tight-head prop for the England U21 Rugby Team, he dislocated his neck in England squad scrum practice. If the referee hadn’t been a qualified paramedic that day in 2005, he might have died. But the end result … Read more...

Melanie Reid – The World I Fell Out Of

Melanie Reid’s ‘Spinal Column’ in The Times is about her life with spinal cord injury. It varies hugely in its tone and emotional tenor. By turns Reid can be darkly humorous or sorry for herself, but she regularly brings a graphic aspect of life with disability into the world of the weekend reader. Her column has covered many aspects. She may be discussing attitudes to wheelchair users (6 December 2014), or describing how her spasticity feels and changes (28 January 2017), or describing with all the gory details the problems of bowel management (27 September 2014).

Now she has completed … Read more...

Untouchable

This is billed as a comedy, but it raises great questions about what someone might want from a carer, what makes a carer relationship work, and the ethics of power relationships within a carer relationship.

Almost by accident, black ex-con Drees becomes a live-in carer for Philippe, a wealthy cultured man with a tetraplegia. Drees’ main attraction for his employer seems to be a complete lack of pity. In addition Drees’ streetwise way of dealing with the secretary, with the neighbour that parks across the gates, with the policemen chasing them on a speeding escapade, and even his alternative dancing … Read more...

Tim Rushby-Smith – Looking Up

Tim Rushby-Smith is not afraid to be honest, whether it is about bowel accidents, or about other people’s attitudes to his spinal-cord injury, or the apparently idiosyncratic fluctuations of his own emotions. But at the same time as sparing no one, including the surgeons and physiotherapists, he manages to inject a humorous tone that makes his memoir both informing and fun.

Tim’s injury was at the bottom of his thoracic spine, giving him full use of his upper limbs and, with practice good trunk control. He even starts the ambitious (and precarious) process of learning to walk with calipers and … Read more...

Henry Fraser – The Little Big Things

The facts are simple: on a holiday in Portugal 17 year-old Henry Fraser had a complete cervical spinal cord injury which left him paralysed and needing ventilation. Over the next two years he went through rehabilitation both at Stoke Mandeville hospital and at home, trained himself to survive without a ventilator and learnt how to balance in his wheelchair. He became an accomplished mouth painter and motivational speaker, and wrote this book.

But this book is much more than a factual account, however useful that might be for clinicians or for others in the same situation. Henry Fraser is an … Read more...

Claire Lomas – Finding My Feet

Claire Lomas is a one-woman whirlwind, and her story is not altogether typical of what happens after spinal cord injury. The book may not be the best written (or edited) of all the accounts reviewed on this website, but it is one of the most authentic. Claire gives us her unadulterated story as she sees it, with no worries about using non-PC language, or squeamishness about bladder and bowel incidents, and no holding back in her criticisms of clinicians encountered along her journey. (I use her comments about the one-size-fits-all approach at the spinal injury unit she attended for discussions … Read more...

Christopher Reeve – Still Me

StillMeChristopher Reeve was Superman on the big screen. Which is what made his catastrophic high cervical spinal cord injury in 1995 all the more poignant. Still Me is his story.

This is another Hollywood autobiography that some of my international Masters students have found difficult, possibly because in chapter 1 Reeve portrays himself as having the best of everything, the best riding lessons, the best tutors, the summer residence in Vermont etc. Later, even his neurosurgeon has to be one of the best, with a CV ‘roughly the size of a county telephone directory’. (Perhaps there is a sense that … Read more...