Have you ever dwelled on how it would have been had you not had the accident? I suspect if I was in your position I would relive it constantly and think about how I could have avoided it.
Secondly, if its not too much, how did it effect your parents marriage. My cousin suffered an injury similar to your courtesy and IED in 2009 and while he was only 21 years old, the stress of his new life ended his parents marriage.
Thirdly, how attached do you get to the professional caretakers?
I’m glad to hear you express this. I’ve always thought it was obnoxious to imply someone was strong and brave simply by virtue of continuing to exist. But as a fully ambulatory person, I also felt obnoxious expressing my opinion on this.
No questions just a hello from someone who’s in the same shape as you are.
How do the logistics work with skydiving? I mean, I assume you did a tandem dive (is that the term? where you’re strapped to a more experienced diver), but did they target a very specific landing spot for you and bring your chair or a gurney or something to that spot?
What, if any, restrictions do you have on what you can eat / drink? You mentioned having a full bottle of wine, and the annual getting drink on December 22, are there any issues with a quadriplegic where, say, alcohol is any riskier than an able-bodied person? Do you have to consume more fiber than someone more mobile? Any other dietary changes?
Aside from the concerns with pressure sores, and autonomic dysreflexia (that’s where your body goes haywire and can’t control temperature, right?) , what other medical issues do you face? Are you more prone to, say, pneumonia?
What about getting your hair done? Do you go to a regular salon, or have someone come to the house?
Would a service dog be at all useful for you? Do you have (or wish to have) any pets?
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… I can’t sweat below my neck…
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Interesting - I did not know that such an injury precluded sweating entirely. I knew of the temperature regulation issues but just assumed that your body wouldn’t “know” how to sweat the “right” amount or something.
And the only reason I knew even THAT much was because of a Doctor G episode where a wheelchair-bound woman was found some distance from her chair, having died of hyperthermia. I don’t recall all the details but it was something to do with her having fallen, been unable to get back into the chair (or it was stuck in the sand), and the heat got to her :(.
Is (or was) it possible for you to bear children? Do you intend, or intend not to, have kids some day? If not, have you made the decision to have yourself sterilized so as to eliminate the possibility of pregnancy and the hassle of menses?
First of all, Larry David can do no wrong. I once ran into him in LA and you would have thought I’d had tea with Brad and Angie, I was so excited. So, of course, I love “Curb.”
I do remember that episode and, as with most episodes, I thought it was hysterical. I didn’t feel demeaned or slighted. For those of us who love comedy, it’s obvious that what Larry David does best is make himself the butt of the joke. The episode wasn’t about how awkward and strange disabled people are–it was about how awkward and strange Larry is.
That being said, I did roll my eyes at the AB actress playing Wendy Wheelchair (not Wanda–perhaps you were thinking of Wanda Sykes?). I’m not militant about it, but it always seems silly to have an AB actress play a role like that when there are people in Hollywood who use chairs and would have loved to play that part. But whatever.
The real issue I had is that those were clearly rickety hospital chairs. No self-respecting para would be caught dead in one of those outside of a rehab hospital. Most paras have sweet little machines that look more like this. It’s just an amateur mistake, something you’d see in a student film. If you’re going to do a whole episode about wheelchairs, you should get a consultant who actually uses one, and who can catch glaringly obvious problems like that.
I don’t know if this will help, but try to remember that the conscious and voluntary communication between my brain and my body is gone, but there are other connections between the brain and body besides the spinal cord. Like the vagus nerve. But, don’t feel bad if it’s confusing. It’s confusing to me, too. Heck, it’s confusing to doctors who study this stuff. There’s just so much we don’t know, and every SCI is different.
Holy crap, NO.
But good question. And it’s not the first time someone has asked me that.
The people who work for me were hired for a very specific set of duties. I get that it’s confusing to people who don’t use carers, since the employer/employee relationship is so physically intimate in my case. But there is a red line a mile wide between appropriate and inappropriate behaviors, and I would never work with someone who didn’t strictly adhere to that. We have a caregiving relationship, not a sexual one. We’re also not besties, though I really like all of them and spend most days and nights around them.
Besides, all my attendants are chicks, and I’m no lesbian. So that’s just another reason it’s “ew” to me. 
I remember the first time I saw a decent chair like that in the early 1980s. Growing up, our next door neighbor had MS, and no funding for hired help, so my family and I ended up helping out a lot. I was so used to seeing Barbara’s institutional style chair, that the bicycle geek in me really came out when I saw the “sports car” model. I would have jumped at the chance to take one for a spin. (Barbara had a spare that her son and I got fairly good at “stunts”) Didn’t hurt that the young women using the chair was a real looker.
Which leads to my question: Would an engineer/bicycle geek asking all kinds of questions about your chair be welcome, or unwanted attention? I realize you are a quad, and the para chairs are probably the sporty ones. Still, there are a bunch of conflicting design goals, and I love seeing how the designers respond to the challenge. Yet I feel that chair users ain’t like the guy with the neat bike…cool or not, they don’t have the choice of not using the thing. So I contain my curiosity and try not to get caught analyzing the chair’s design. Probably makes the user think I am staring at them. I obviously need better people skills.
Hm. Well, I was a busy kid, athletic and full of kinetic energy. I was a jock, and I didn’t really like school. I brought home my share of Cs, though I was mostly a B student. For the first year after my accident, I would often have panic attacks after I got in bed for the night. The stillness of my body–masked by the mobility offered by my chair and a flurry of helping hands in the daytime–sat like an anvil on my chest once I was lying down in a dark room at night, a ventilator breathing for me for those first 8 months.
Then, after that first year, I discovered I could channel that energy that still felt like it was trapped in my body into my brain. I simultaneously discovered that my brain was good for more than just judging the distance between my foot and the soccer goal. I got really into my schoolwork that second semester of freshman year of high school, and all of a sudden it seemed so effortless to get all As. I was so surprised–I had built such an identity on what seemed to be my above-average physical abilities, that I had assumed my brain was just normal, or maybe below-average. Turns out, I just hadn’t tapped its power, because I’d been ignoring it in favor of my body.
I’m realizing that all sounds like I’m a little full of myself. Look, I don’t think my mind is going to change the world. I’d be shocked if I were ever admitted into Mensa. And I suck at math. 
But the thing I’m not sure I ever would have discovered with a fully functional body is that my brain is good for something, too. Does that make any sense?
I sure do. Peristalsis isn’t regulated by the spinal cord, but rather by the intestines themselves.
Ok, first off, you’re a really engaging writer, and you sound like a fun person in general. Thanks for being willing to answer these questions - it’s awesome to learn so much.
So… you can’t SNEEZE? How does that even work? Do you still get nose-itchies and just can’t do anything about them? Is that not like the 8th circle of hell? Or is your nose all boss now and unfazed by minor things like pollen season or cat hair?
I’m boggling here. My husband hates sneezing with a passion, and I’ve learned to snuff mine because I always have to sneeze at the quiet or intense parts of movies (although I hear it’s really bad for you to do that) but I never even thought that sneezing was something that could go away.
Also, I learned as a child that sweating helped keep your skin glands going in good condition - since you can’t sweat, do you have difficulties keeping your skin in good shape, or was my childhood teacher blowing smoke? Do you get pimples or rashes or things like that? I’m assuming goosebumps are out also…
Meh. It’s a fool’s errand. If I hadn’t gone for the flip that day, might I have become an Olympic snowboarder? Possibly. But it’s just as possible that I might have ended up pregnant at 16, or later died in a car crash while texting. So this activity has little purpose and even less appeal to me.
My parents are still happily married. But that’s not to say there weren’t rough times. The novel I’ve been working on is about a couple who loses a child and it is based at least in part on recalling what has transpired in my parents’ marriage over the years since my accident. Obviously, I didn’t actually die, but there was a “death” in a sense, of what my parents assumed my life would be like.
I think there were a few things working in their favor, and a couple without these attributes might not have made it: One, they had a really strong marriage before I got hurt. Two, they had enough money to pay for the immediate and long-term aftermath of my injury, which also meant no one in the family had to become my full-time caregiver. And the third one is kind of intangible, but somehow they were able to find a way to grieve together instead of separately. Many couples who lose a child or experience a great tragedy distance themselves from one another because they either have very different grieving styles, or because just looking at the other person and seeing their shared loss reflected there makes them unbearably sad. For whatever reason, my parents always seemed in step in their process, and so it made them stronger instead of breaking them. That’s my theory anyway.
I enjoy them as you would enjoy any co-worker that you had hand-picked. But I am careful with emotional boundaries, since the physical boundaries are different than what they would be in a normal employer/employee relationship. I will sometimes bring them along when I’m out with friends, but they’re on the clock during that time and expected to have the same sense of professionalism there that they’d have at my house. And I don’t generally see them socially outside of the times that they’re taking care of me.
Perhaps too mundane for this thread, but since I’m enjoying reading your writing, it’s worth asking: why did you choose this particular user name, and what brought you to the Straight Dope?
ETA: Oh, and, as a So. Cal. native and an athlete, are there any sports teams you follow? 
Thanks for the insights about your parents. A cousin of mine died at age eight, and it tore my aunt & uncle’s marriage to shreds. I’ve wondered why that’s common but not universal, for marriages to splinter in the wake of a tragedy. Reflecting back, my relatives had none of the things you mention going for them …
Food for thought, anyway.
Okay, I got another one: what’s your idea of a fun night out with friends?
I can clear this up for you–you’re under the misapprehension that my diaphragm is paralyzed. It isn’t. It’s still under my conscious control, since the diaphragm is innervated by the phrenic nerve, which comes off the spinal cord at C3-C5. My cord ends at C4, but lucky me–that’s where most of the phrenic nerve is located. So I can breathe, or hold my breathe, or exhale, or speak whenever I want to.
As an offshoot though, that’s why vent-dependent quads sometimes sound breathy when they speak and sometimes their sentences trail off before they’re done talking. They have to form their words in concert with the action of the ventilator, so they “catch” the moment when they exhale and can produce sounds with their vocal cords. shudder I do not miss that at all…
I’ve been captivated reading your posts. Thank you for sharing.
Welcome!
I was thinking about blinkie earlier today, wondering what a conversation between the two of you would be like. I urge you to look through blinkie’s posting history.
There may be nothing more than a similarity of physical limitations. Or there could be quite an interesting conversation for you to take private or let us virtually eavesdrop on.
Do you get to vacation very much? I’m interested to hear about how you manage the particulars - I presume your caregivers get a free vacation out of it? - and how about flying on an airplane? Are there certain plane models/airlines that you avoid?
Have you ever been on a cruise? When I was on my honeymoon back in 2005, the ship made a point of seating all the newlyweds at the same table, and two of the people at our table were a quadriplegic and his new wife. Tell you what, that guy was all about having fun. I ran into him EVERYWHERE on the ship. Playing blackjack in the casino? Check. Hot tub? Check. Midnight buffet? Yep. Dude was getting a massage or something in the spa when I went in there. He even showed up for the ballroom dancing lessons. (!!)
In retrospect, though… I wonder how much fun the new wife was having on that trip. Maybe there was a incognito caregiver waiting in the wings that I didn’t see, since I wasn’t looking for one.
Thank you! Appreciate the advice.
Oh my gosh, I would so not be offended if you approached me and asked about my chair! (My actual chair has some modifications, but that’s the basic model). I’d think it was pretty cool that here’s a guy who sees the chair, and instead of thinking “what a poor, strong wretch,” thinks “sweet ride!” 
Of course, you’d be disappointed pretty quickly that I have no idea how the darn thing works. One of my brothers is a gearhead Air Force test pilot (I know, I know, he’s super cool) and he is the one who has always been tasked with picking out my chairs and other geeky stuff and getting everything set up for me. You’d have much more fun tinkering with and discussing my chair if he happened to be with me at the time.
I can’t speak for all chair users, obviously, but I can’t think of why someone would be offended by this.