I’ve often been asked what a typical day looks like for me as a quadriplegic (quad). While every quad is different I can confidently generalize that with being paralyzed and fully dependent one has to spend a minimum of several hours a day dealing with general spinal cord injury care. I can only speak to my personal experience, but over the last 7 years I’ve had to widely adjust my expectations about how much I can get accomplished in a day.
Regardless if you suffer from a spinal cord injury or not, one has to manage their expectations on a daily basis. If you are a mother of four small children or a high-powered attorney who has a full docket of cases to review with a family at home, how you manage your time is essential.
I am the type of person who likes to be extremely productive and utilize every moment of every day in order to learn something new, enjoy life, trying to things, and get things done. I have a full-time job, which requires immense attention on a regular basis. This does prevent me from getting out and about as I would like during the weekdays. However, this is my choice and professional productivity is very important to me. The challenge with being paralyzed is that you have to devote so many hours a day to general survival for your healthcare.
I was calculating out the amount of hours I spend on essential spinal cord injury care each day, how much exercise I engage in, how many hours I need to work, and most importantly, how this all fits in with my constant chronic nerve pain that feels like pins and needles piercing my body every moment of every day. Needless-to-say this can be challenging.
It turns out that I need about 4 hours at minimum to complete my bowel and bladder care, shower, getting in and out of bed, and general caregiving activities each day. I then exercise for about 1.5 hours a day. These are the essentials I need just to survive on a daily basis. The particular challenge with respect to my situation is with the chronic nerve pain that plagues me on a daily basis because my productivity goes way down mid-afternoon. This means I need to get in bed early, relax, meditate, and try to re-direct my pain in order to sleep well to be productive the next day.
I generally get most of my busy work done in the morning, work quietly until mid-afternoon, and then get in bed early. Over the years I’ve pushed myself to the brink of exhaustion, pain breakouts, and complete misery with trying to get too much done in a day. I’m not including the periods in life where anxiety or depression can take over, which can further drastically reduce one’s productivity in a day due to emotional up’s and down’s.
What a typical able-bodied person gets done in a workday of approximately 8-10 hours I have to get complete in no more than 4 to 5 hours. Continue reading