I've always been vain. I like being thin, wearing nice clothes, keeping my skin good. So one of the many things I find hard about my injury is how my body has been affected. From having a 30 inch waist, I'm now more like 38, because of 'tetra tummy'. J Cole in his book "Still Lives: Narratives of Spinal Cord Injury" (which I've just bought) explains it thus: "In thoracic injuries and below, people are paraplegic. In T1 to T8 lesions, trunk muscles as well as chest wall breathing are lost, leading to difficulties in balance in a wheelchair, which are shared with all tetraplegics. In addition, the abdominal muscles are also paralysed, leading to the tetra tummy, a lax and large abdomen that can be so dispiriting". I hate it. I hate my bulging fat tummy. I hate the way I can't wear any trousers other than the standard SCI uniform of tracksuit bottoms, or trousers with drawstrings: all others are too hard to pull up. I can wear jeans, but they take ages to get on. For someone who used to love all his different trousers, this is particularly galling. And it's not about eating. I probably eat about half as much as I used to, can skip meals fairly easily, and yet losing weight from my tummy is very hard, since it's the muscle tone that's gone as much as extra fat being put on.
I'm lucky in that the rest of my body looks fairly normal. I'm especially pleased about my legs. At one stage in hospital when I had lost about two and a half stone in weight, they looked like chicken legs: scrawny and horribly thin. Since then though, my spasms have got worse, which, whilst actually quite dangerous in terms of how they can make transfers difficult (when my legs suddenly flex they can pull me out of the chair), allow my legs to remain pretty muscled. So, vanity and body image versus safety? I'd rather the muscled legs to be honest.
