Related to Material relating to the rehabilitation of spinal and spinal cord injuries
Description:

First-hand account of living with paraplegia:

 

'this business of dealing with the problem of paraplegia is rather like coping with income tax in this country to-day. Your first £110 you get free of tax - that is your initial adjustment, the automatic one, the time when you are in hospital and you begin to realise that there are endless things that you can still enjoy, plenty of scope for ambition. Then come the tax-free allowances - the placidity of your type of mind, your lack of ambition, the apparent simplicities of your new existence... But it is after that, after you break away from the simplified life of hospital, once you start doing things, that the difficulties begin. It is then that the Collector of Taxes starts knocking daily on your door. For you begin to realise, not what you can't do, but that you do not know accurately what you can't do. And this is the taxation, this is what ends, when you have proved that you can do almost everything, at 19/6 in the £.' (22)

 

'How do you know this can't be done or that achieved?... to acquire that knowledge means that acceptance is not the first thing, but the last.

... between the first and last lies the process of discovery. Not just one discovery, but hundreds. You are not just Columbus, but you are Drake and Magellan and Henry the Navigator as well... You are always searching and always finding and always on the verge of discovery... That of course, is the problem. When do you settle back and reckon the existing maps are good enough?' (23)