Brace Begone

Saturday, April 3

5:35 pm

The days have become a blur of people, doctors, and nurses constantly coming in and out of my room. Except when I need something, and then it feels like I’m left alone for an hour unless I call. To call my nurse, I have a little suspended tube that I blow into that triggers the call button. It’s a little bit hard to position the tube, which is on a wheeled cart that doesn’t always stay exactly where they put it, and it has a flexible neck, similar to what you would find on a lamp with an adjustable head. The position of this tube is important to me, because I have to be able to reach it with my lips. But when you put it in front of my nose, I go cross-eyed, and it becomes very annoying if it is in my line of sight. So I ask my nurses to bend the neck so that it is below my chin and comes back up to my mouth at a point where I can reach it. I have to admit, it’s been much easier to do this since I’ve taken off my neck brace.

I was put in a neck brace immediately after the accident, and I stayed in the brace full time until Thursday. Honestly, the first two days, it was so ill-fitting that I wasn’t quite sure it was doing anything. My chin could tuck down inside the brace. But it was stabilizing my head from left to right. On Tuesday morning, I complained about it to resident Dr. Baranski, who turned out to be the first person I’d encountered who understood how to adjust this neck brace. The brace has two pieces, front and back: the front goes under my chin and down to my breastbone, and the back sits behind the neck from the bottom of the skull to the top of the spine. The front and back pieces are pulled together and tightened with velcro straps on the sides. The one adjustment that no one else had done is the wheel in the front that adjusts the chin piece up and down—like the little wheel on a bicycle helmet, which (thank goodness) works very well. After Dr. Baranski adjusted it, the brace was very tight but more comfortable than it had been since I had come to the hospital.

My neck brace

On Thursday, neurosurgery cleared me to remove the brace while I was in bed. This didn’t make my PT team happy, although I did wear it willingly during my PT sessions. This also didn’t make Christine happy, who kept scolding me whenever I moved my head. When my 6 am doctor visitor came in today (an intern I hadn’t met before), Christine asked him about my overnight pain (see 3:37 am entry) and whether there was any concern that I might cause further damage to my compromised spinal cord. He explained (in medical terms that I would not have understood a week ago) that, although I have a narrow spinal cord, there is still fluid around the central tract. This means that there is less risk of further degradation. While still rightfully concerned about me, Christine was less horrified by my liberal head movements after hearing him say that.