Is there quality of life with Spinal Injury?

13 years ago when my husband broke his neck, one of the nurses in intensive care said to my husband’s poor mum, ‘oh don’t worry, they get about 30 years out of them now’.

That was our introduction to Spinal Cord Injury.

Not only that, but the people around us in intensive care kept dropping off, and the outlook down on the rehab ward didn’t feel much better.

We really did wonder; would we have quality of life with spinal cord injury? Was there a way our family would ever just carry on, business as usual?

Looking back, I can see why at the ripe age of 22, and my husband at 30. It is reasonable enough to see why the future looked pretty grim in those days.

When my husband had his injury, I was 6 months pregnant with our first boy. That meant that just after my husband came out of intensive care, three months later, I had a our first child together, a nice fat 10 pound boy. So, compared to everyone else around us at the time, we had something outside of ourselves, and this new injury to deal with. And quickly at that. So, Zac my husband and I, threw ourselves into our child, and getting the hell out of hospital, getting away from the grim, and trying to create some sort of new normal.

We did all the usual things, we modified our home, pulled it apart from top to bottom and rebuilt. We added wide doorways, and an accessible bathroom, we found all the equipment and we started our new normal. Which was not very normal at all, to everyone else, but to us it was home. A sanctuary away from the 6 months of hell we’d just been through in hospital.

However, we very quickly realised that when we got home, things slowed down and we were quickly presented with again, in a whole new way, the way our life would now be, as the doctors said, forever, or at least for the next 30 years.

I went back to work, and our baby boy went to daycare, and our lives restarted. We lived in town and my husband wasn’t in love with the life we had there. We had always wanted our own space to raise our family and get out of town.

We just thought, let’s do it. So first we went around Australia, about 2 years after Zac’s injury we thought, why not? What’s stopping us, so off we went. Travelling and doing our thing, breaking down barriers and building ourselves back up and entirely new identity to the one before the injury.

When we returned, we had 100% decided that we wanted to live in the bush, and that we should start now. So, we found a farm, a little one, about 10 acres outside of a little rural down and restarted, again. It’s an old Queenslander, so we did the doorways and the ramps and the bathrooms, once again. And never once let the injury get in our way.

Many a time, it cracked us, beat us down, tried to tear us apart. But we got back up, every time, we got back up, and we tried and tried again. Until we had built and finished what we now call home.

So, is it possible, to have quality of life with a Spinal Injury? Well, summarising a very well lived 13 years into a few hundred words, yes, it is.

But it’s your outlook, and those around you. They contribute to your life going on for the better. And, I think regardless, injury or not, we all have to make that choice at some point. To live, or to let life pass us by, and if we just do that, then why were we even here to start with? Best just get up and get on with it we reckon.

We’ve also, since then. Built up an epic little business supporting other people with disability in and around our beautiful town. We figured, we know what it’s like and what people do and don’t like when it comes to care, so why not do make our own service?

You can check us out here – www.quadcare.com.au

Every photo you see on out site, is real people, doing real things in a real community in the beautiful sunshine coast hinterland, QLD, Australia.