Cold weather and bladder care (it rhymes)

 I keep meaning to write but I guess I've been a bit lazy so I guess I'll stop that right now. My birthday just passed last week and I had blast this past weekend hanging with friends and family. Have I ever mentioned how much I love living in Florida? It is seriously warm 90% of the year. Now, even before my spinal cord injury I was not the biggest fan of cold weather anything below 75 gives me the chills. When you have a high level injury like mine you loose a lot of weight and it gets even harder to stay warm in cold weather.. I've had a rough time trying to stay warm and this winter, as warm as it may be, its just killing me in the mornings. I've never lived somewhere where the beach was more than thirty minutes away so I got pretty lucky on my location after my injury. I couldn't imagine living anywhere where it snows... Unless there was a wheelchair snowboard for high level injuries.

Getting away from the cold talk. I've been working on tutorial videos for quadriplegics and been getting some positive feedback. I guess the main reason I'm doing it is to help with independence. To me the two main things a quadriplegic must learn to do before being able to be off on their own is A. Independent transfers and B. independent bladder care. If you can't do these two then you won't be able to spend even one day by yourself let alone get your own place. Now, out of experience in both these fields I know how much trouble and frustration can come with them. Out of the two it took me much longer to get my bladder under control and yes it was really, really frustrating.

My therapists really pushed me to self cath from the get go and I'm thankful for it. Straight out of my injury I was stuck in a foley bag and I never thought about cathing because it almost seemed impossible with no finger function. The thing about peeing as a quad is that you're starting over and learning how to do something all over again in a different way and you have to choose out of several ways to do it. You can always switch between them but it's seriously a pain training your body to something new each time. Whichever you pick I feel that being able to do it yourself is most important whether it's a foley, leg bag, self Cath or other. Here's a video of how I do my thing.

It took a lot of chair and bed wetting but the trick to self cathing is knowing how much liquid your bladder can hold before releasing the golden flow with and without food in your stomach because yes that makes a difference. It helps to start with 5 hour runs but once you're comfy move that baby up because I don't know about you but I sleep a lot longer than that and if you cant do transfers or cath yourself you're just forcing someone else to use their valuable time to do it so work hard and thank your caretakers. I hope that helps someone.