“I don’t look like I’ve had a spinal cord injury. I’ve been really lucky. I’m walking, but I’m not ok.”
Setting off to walk home is the last thing he remembers. With home just a few minutes’ walk away, deciding to get a hire scooter seemed odd. He wouldn’t usually – he was so close.
But when he came to, with the scooter lying beside him, he’d obviously got on one. Now he was lying face-first on the asphalt. His face was a mess. He could taste blood and the road.
His legs were strangely bent. They ‘felt’ weird, but he couldn’t move them-or anything else.
Cam’s recovery has been quick in many ways. He’s walking and has returned to work part-time. If you look, you can see his left hand looks stiff, but otherwise you wouldn’t know he’d broken his neck. He laughs about the pins holding him together. Of course, you can’t see them, but he jokes that they are his ready-made Halloween costume!
Looking at him, Cam has recovered. Even the doctors agree, they’ve done what they can for him, and he’s walking. But spinal cord injury runs deep, and Cam’s pain is hidden.
Cam suffers from chronic neuropathic pain. It’s intense and constant. “It feels like burning or stabbing inside my arm,” he says. “It keeps me awake. It never stops.” There is no treatment as such, just strong painkillers. “The painkillers take the edge off a bit but leave my fingers numb.” That’s a concerning sensation for someone trying to recover from a spinal cord injury.
Neuropathic pain is felt by more than half of those with a spinal cord injury. It is hard to treat, and we’re still not quite sure why some experience it and others don’t. Your donation funds vital research to better understand and therefore treat spinal cord injury.
Cam considers himself lucky. But he’s not the same person he was just a few years ago. Along with the constant pain, he struggles with fatigue. “I was determined to get back to work, but it’s not easy. A few hours and I’m absolutely shattered. I have to consciously think about every movement. Everything is so slow and so hard.”
Neuropathic pain can occur in areas where there is sensation and in areas where there isn’t. True recovery can only happen when we fully understand and can heal the spinal cord.
Neuropathic pain is directly related to the spinal cord injury itself. If we can heal the injury, we hope to stop the pain.
Our research team, the Spine Squad, are looking to better understand the spinal cord and improve knowledge and classification of injuries.
At the same time, they’re working on techniques to regenerate nerves – to heal the injury. Only with healing can we address all the effects of spinal cord injury, including the hidden ones.
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