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Your Bowel
Immediately following a spinal cord injury
your bowel will be flaccid, that is, lacking
muscle movement. Your intestines will
still continue to function, processing food
and absorbing nutrients. Depending on
your level of injury you will either develop
a reflex bowel, or your bowel may continue
to be flaccid
Reflex Bowel
If your injury is above T12 your bowel
will probably empty by a reflex action.
With spinal cord impairment the feelings
to indicate that the rectum is full are not
able to reach the brain, but they will reach
the spinal cord. As the rectum gets full
and stretches it pushes on the nerves in
the bowel. This causes a sensory signal to
be sent from the bowel through the sacral
nerves to the spinal cord. The signal then
loops back down along the sacral nerves to
the bowel muscles. At this point you would
have a bowel motion.
Flaccid Bowel
If your lesion is at L1 or below, the bowel
will probably not have a reflex action. This
is because the spinal cord ends at around L1
so any signals from the rectal nerves cannot
loop along the sacral nerves to the spinal
cord. This means that the bowel muscles
will not squeeze and the rectal sphincter
muscle stays loose.
You will probably need to learn differen
ways of managing your food intake
and bowel movements. A good bowel
management program will help you regain
some control and keep you healthier.
See the Bowel chapter for more
information on this area.
Your Bladder
'Taking a pee’ is one of the most common
body care activities we undertake, passing
urine is the end part of a simple but
important body process. The body’s urinary
system spends all of its time monitoring the
amount of water and wastes in your body.
It is the ‘oil filte ’ of the body, keeping your
lifeblood clean and running smoothly.
A spinal cord impairment will affect your
ability to pee in some way. Any impairment,
no matter how minor, will affect part of your
‘chain of command’. However, there are
a number of different bladder management
techniques that will allow you to gain
control over your bladder function.
Learning good bladder management
techniques is important to help keep you
free from infections, bladder and kidney
stones, and other complications both now
and in the long term.
See the Bladder chapter for
more information on this area.
“Don’t let things get in your way
from doing something just because you
don’t think you can do it. Try as many
different ways to do something, in the
end you will find a way to do it that
works well after the 100’s of attempts
that didn’t work. Doing the buttons up
on my jeans took me 30 mins the first
time, 20 the second and now it only
takes about 25 seconds. It took a long
time to figure out how but now it is so
simple. I have struggled initially but
now I can do almost anything.”
Tim Johnson C6/7
31
© New Zealand Spinal Trust, 2014