One of these days...POW! Right in the target point.

Ever tried eating cereal like this?

Mixing Jackie Gleason and science. Do people still know who Gleason is?

Trigger points? 

From what I can figure, it's a pain in one point that causes a pain somewhere else, and that's the pain in my hip that I have often wrote about.

When you get told over and over that it's just neuropathic pain (a pain that comes from the damage to the central nervous system), you start to give up on trying to find the reason.

How did I figure this out? Well, one day I went to rehab with a pain in my back and ribs that was terrible. This pain had always been there from the day after my third operation, but was never as bad as my hip pain so I put it lower on the priority list. This hip pain was also interesting because everytime I raised my hand to my mouth, the hip pain was crazy.

Have you ever seen American movies where the prisoner's handcuffed wrists are shackled to his leg irons? The only way he can smoke is by moving his mouth to his half raised hands. This was me!

I guess you could say that it's another good reason to quit smoking, but eating cereal was also a challenge.

Anyhow, back to my physical therapist at rehab. He started massaging the pain in my back and found a massive knot of muscle which led to more tight muscles all around it. When he was done, the pain in my hip also felt a whole lot better.

My conclusion, I guess since the pain started immediately after my operation, is that having to reach my spinal cord and having to push the muscles around, some damage must have taken place. I don't blame the surgeon for this. It wasn't like he walked in drunk with a cigarette dangling from his lips laughing a crazy laugh, but I do wish he would have listened more and drawn a conclusion about what happened rather having me live a year and a half in hell.

Now I'm going for massage regularly and even hope that the burning and spasticity in my legs will also improve from the massage as this also got worse the day after the operation and could be a reaction to pain in the absence of any feeling.

I am feeling much better.

So what does this have to do with a cure for paralysis? Loads!

Cure activists are constantly labelled as ANTI care. You know, "if you can't cure us, kill us" Jack Kevorkian types. Well, I'll tell you that it's a false accusation and the only reason it's used is to try to drive a false wedge between people. The goal is often to make cure activists sound like they're not interested in anything if it's not cure.

Well, as a paraplegic, the only reason I'm alive now is because care has improved. Better standards in care also have made sure that something like a urinary tract infection hasn't killed me either, and the massage on my trigger point has already improved my quality of life a hundred fold.

We're in favour of cure for two reasons. One is that no amount of care can deal with all the secondary issues that we live with and two, because science is proving it possible. Therefore we do demand that cure money at least matches care money in the hear and now. Not supporting cure would be like supporting a constant bandaid as opposed to fixing what is causing the need for the bandaid in the first place if it were possible.

So the next person who accuses me of being anti-care will get it...POW! Right in the trigger point.