Infection was a killer ...

Press, 27 July 1976, Page 17

Infection was a killer ...

Twenty years ago medical science could not keep quadraplegics alive. Sooner or later after their paralysing accidents they died of infection in the chest, or in the urinary tract, or of the skin. Antibiotics take care of those infections nowadays and the ife expectancy of a quadraplegic is much the same as anyone else’s. Coupled with the antibiotics are various physical manoeuvres which aid the internal functions. For example, St John of God Hospital is equipped with a tilt table to which

the quadraplegic is strapped. This enables him to be placed in a vertical position, thereby relieving pressure on the buttocks caused by long periods of sitting in a wheelchair. It also assists the drainage of the urinary system, lessening the risk of infection. The whole approach of St John of God Hospital spinal unit is in practice aimed at dehospitalising its residents. To the greatest extent possible the lives of the occupants are directed to individualism and privacy.

The programme of rehabilitation, necessarily long and painstaking, goes on little by little day after day. Largely, the extent to which any resident becomes rehabilitated depends on the degree of individual motivation. Among the people to have come and gone are a top-dressing pilot whose crash and subsequent paralysis did not deter him from piecing the fragments together again in the form of a permanent job as a computer operator and family man.

Another young man, totally paralysed by a football injury, married one of the girls who nursed him and is well advanced and employed in a draughting course with a large housing organisation in Christchurch. He, too, lives in his own home. Among the residents at St John of God are others who go to work or study every day. Richard Fright, aged 19, is one of them. He was all set to begin university studies to become an electrical engineer when his accident

intervened. He dived into the water at Diamond Harbour, struck a submerged object, and broke his neck. Two years in a spinal unit did nothing to deter his ambition in engineering even though the complications have slowed the rate of his scholastic progress. His transport daily to the university is made possible by the provision of a bus equipped with a hydraulic lift, which was a gift to the hospital from the combined women’s service organisations of Christchurch.