The Great Spasm Struggle As I'm sure many of you reading will attest - spasms are one of, if not the most, infuriating side effect of spinal cord injury. Beginning the very moment I wake up and roll onto my back, these unannounced muscle tremors stay with me throughout the day, predominantly presenting themselves in my legs. Going for a push outside, there's a near-guarantee that, the moment my casters get so much as a whiff of a bump or lump in the road, my feet will start tap-tap-tapping their way off the footplate until they're dangling off the end, waiting patiently for me to reposition th ..read more

A Millennial Milestone November, 2022.  The unthinkable happened.  I turned 40. After counting down from months, to weeks, to days, it finally arrived. I'm not really sure what dramatic and irreparable change I expected to occur on the morning in question; perhaps a sudden, drastic aging, akin to Tim Allen in The Santa Clause?! The truth was far less slapstick, because I largely looked and felt exactly the same as I had done the previous days, weeks and months. (Apologies to anyone coming into this expecting a heart-warming Christmas tale involving personal growth, slapstick comedy a ..read more

New Year, New Injury, New Questions As we all enter a brand new year, my 17th on wheels, I wanted to pose a question to my fellow "person's of varying disabilities", something that's been on my mind more and more recently:  How have you dealt, or how do you plan to deal, with an eventual loss of independence? I ask this because a couple of months ago I woke up one morning and found myself unable to transfer out of bed and into my chair. Every time I went to push through my arms and lift, shooting pains went all down my left arm. I spent a good 20 minutes trying to push through the pain, d ..read more

Sittin' On The Deck Of The Bay Windows After what felt like the longest winter imaginable here in the UK, with my hoodie 'n' heating combo lasting until the end of May; this past month has finally seen the rain let up and temperatures break into the tumultuous teens! With so long spent indoors over the colder 6+ months, it feels genuinely rejuvenating to go outside, water the plants, feed the birds, and then just sit and feel the warmth of the sun on my face. So much so in fact, that I start to get antsy if I'm sat on the living room sofa and happen to look out of the French doors to see the g ..read more

The Nightmare Before Christmas For most of us, referring to 2020 as "a challenging year" would be akin to referring to spinal cord injury as a "bit of back ache". What began as the start of a promising new decade quickly descended into a year to be largely written off. Yet, with us now entering the final straight and a vaccine tentatively hovering on the horizon, the hope of things returning to a semblance of normalcy at some point in 2021 seems to be a genuine possibility.   Firstly however, there is one small matter left to attend to, one final hurdle in the 2020 marathon to overco ..read more

The New Norm...?   In my previous blog entry from April, which feels like a solid decade ago at this point, I confidently mused that by the time I got round to writing my next entry, all this Coronavirus nonsense would be "firmly in the rearview mirror"...     ...oh to be young and naive again!    Yes, I now find myself firmly at the stage where, with no miracle breakthrough on the horizon, rather than considering when we'll get on top of this virus, I'm considering if we'll get on top of it.    Life, although severely altered for the foreseeable future, mu ..read more

Apocalypse Now I'm not going to lie, a few months ago when we initially entered 2020, I didn't expect my first blog entry of the new decade to be dealing with the apocalypse, but here we are. In fact, it seems positively ironic that in my previous entry I'd spoken about how uncomfortable I felt accepting help off strangers, and now it's illegal to be within 2 metres of any of them...I guess the moral of the story is be careful what you wish for! Only a few months since the first case was reported in Wuhan, China, Covid-19 aka Coronavirus has spread across the globe, forcing not only entire c ..read more

An Aversion To Assistance Confession time: My name is Gareth and I am terrible at asking for help from strangers. I haven't always been this way however, this little aversion being a definite mental side effect of my injury. I'm not sure what exactly it's rooted in; whether it's a combination of pig-headed pride and stubbornness, or whether it's because I always used to be the person others would come to for help when it came to physical tasks and hate the thought that I'm now somehow less able than I was. Either way, for the last 14 years I've struggled to shake the feeling of defeat when ha ..read more

A New Product To Get Hooked On A few years ago you may (or more likely, may not) recall that I wrote a blog entry about how Active Hands was branching out and had begun selling certain disability products designed by others alongside their own gripping aids. I focussed specifically on the Ungrip, a material loop that fits onto the back of any phone, allowing you to slide a finger into it and ensure it spends more time in your hand and less time on the floor with a giant crack across the screen! Since then, plenty more new and unique items have been added to the website, a detailed list of whic ..read more