Here is my disclaimer. I’m going to mention *gasp* POOP in this blog. Beware if you don’t want to hear about it. Please feel free to skip it. Also, this post is about Brady, and I have his confident approval to talk about this. Because its a) not taboo, and b) hilarious, in part. So. Consider yourself warned.
Education time!
Most people who are paralyzed don’t have as much use of their muscles as the rest of us. This is all pretty logical, right? But you maybe haven’t thought about it in this way, so I’m going to take you there.
In Brady’s case, much of his feeling is lost, but he has lots of strength left. Many of his muscles below his ribcage still have lots of strength. Thank you Lord!! However, he has completely lost his lower abs. Completely. They will atrophy and disappear, if they haven’t already. He cannot physically do a sit-up anymore. They’re just gone. And as you can imagine, that affects his intestines and some of the inner workings!
Just about every person we’ve encountered in the world of spinal cord injury has a “bowel program.” This sounds very official, but it isn’t. It just means they have a system to make sure they poop. Everyone’s program is different. Some are very difficult and complex. But they have to be done. We are incredibly fortunate that Brady’s bowel program is not complicated at all!
Brady’s bowel program consists of a daily stool softener, and a dose of laxative. Because, I’m sure you can imagine, his muscles don’t really “push” as much as they used to. So there needs to be very little work involved in making things move in there. You get it. We all get it.
Recently, instead of carting his water bottle back and forth, Brady leaves a bottle at work and has his bottle at home. He used to drink his laxative powder in his water bottle, but not anymore, because he doesn’t bring it in his bottle. He tries to remember to drink it in a glass of water when he gets home, but it doesn’t often happen. So we were thinking he needs to take it at work. Because he’s missing it. And he’s not pooping regularly anymore.
But no one wants to bring a giant bottle of laxative to work. It would be ok. He would live. But it would be a little extra vulnerable, and he’s already vulnerable in enough ways, so we tried to find an alternative.
We discovered you can buy single doses, but they are OVER A DOLLAR A DOSE!!! This is absolutely bananas, and there is simply no way we could justify it. So we opted to order a million little ziploc bags off of amazon and make our own single doses!
The bags arrived yesterday and I set to work making a handful of doses. Not a ton, just in case the system doesn’t work well and we try something else. As I worked, I realized what exactly I was preparing for Brady.
Sketchy little drug bags of suspicious white powder 😂 Whoops!! We had a good laugh, and he is definitely still taking them to work, lol!
He’s giving it a go today! Hopefully this helps things get a bit more consistent in the coming days!
Thanks for being a comfortable enough group to talk about this stuff with 🙂 I like knowing no one will be judging us. Nothing about this is taboo. Its just the way of life over here, and Brady is making it work! We are SO fortunate.
Anyway. Poop post over. 💩