For now, today, screw fate - OMFG!!!! this new chair is amazing. It’s such a huge advance over the worn-out Q2. I would NOT have believed it. I’ve had a Cheshire grin all day today at work. I will be writing about it in detail this evening.

For me, the most powerful line is “There’s no getting around the fact that the experience is highly traumatic.” Yes. I know that this is going to be the case. I don’t expect that BIID will protect me from this. I expect tears, grief, and depression. Yes, this all scares me; but being scared doesn’t stop me from doing things.

The only experience I have to guide me is the genital surgery. I was scared of that too. The recovery was much longer, much more painful, and much more bloody than I had imagined from anything I had read or been told. Nevertheless, I had not even one millisecond of regret. I am optimistic that I will at least be spared regret after I get a complete SCI.

Thank you so much for sharing your unique experience with us, Lane.

It’s a good point though about SCIs and being in hospital is hard. Intellectually many of us here “know” that fact but there’s no way it would hit home until we went through that ourselves. It’s a point most genuinely disabled people like to point out, we haven’t been through that part like they have.