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Written by Beth Luce
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Page 3 of 4
“Loss of movement is a key issue for a patient, of course, but then there are issues with loss of sensation, loss of normal bladder function, bowel function and sexual function,” Cardenas explains. “Usually the biggest challenge is pain where you don’t have feeling, pain that occurs from the nerve, from damage to the spinal cord itself. It’s a very difficult problem to treat.”
With a 1969 bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas-Austin and a 1973 medical degree from University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, Cardenas came to the UW to complete her internship and residency in physical medicine and rehabilitation medicine. She joined the UW faculty in 1981 and in 2001 earned a master’s in health administration.
She became interested in spinal cord injuries on the rehab floor. “I found caring for the patients to be very rewarding,” she says. “They were very inquisitive, had a lot of questions and I found them to be challenging patients to work with when I was a trainee.”
Life in the rehab center, Hennig says, helped prepare him for life in the real world. “I left there with the ability to do my own wheelchair transfers and drive and do some personal care,” he says. The relationships he built with the staff gave him a resource for information, something not as readily available to patients in recent years. “Today the average stay is much shorter, maybe three months at most,” he says. “People don’t leave the hospital with the same level of competency that I did.” This abbreviated time in rehabilitation leaves gaps in what people with spinal cord injuries know about how to live with their condition.
Cardenas implemented two programs powered by volunteers specifically to help improve the lives of people with spinal cord injuries. In the late 1980s, she founded the Spinal Cord Injury Forum, where injured people learn about the latest research, equipment to help their mobility and ways to live a satisfying life. More recently she started a program that matches new patients with peers who have been previously injured (see “Being There”).
The forum sessions get down to basics. How do you use a catheter while traveling on an airplane? How do you make sure your hotel room will really be accessible when you get to your destination? Where can you find a good swimming program? What are the best ideas for remodeling your house? How do you begin or maintain a romantic relationship? How do you conceive children and parent them?
Sometimes the injured people themselves do presentations or sit on panels, giving personal insight into the subject. “I’ve learned a lot about the spirit people have when they have a disability,” she says. “They go out and kayak and climb mountains and have fun. They tackle certain situations, like parenting or dating. It’s one thing to know about the physiologic and medical aspects, but it’s another for someone to tell you what it was like and how horrible it was—or how easy.”
Hennig is co-chair of the Spinal Cord Injury Consumer Advisory Board, which helps plan the forums and gives the medical center advice from the user’s point of view. This year, on Valentine’s Day, the forum’s topic was sexuality after a spinal cord injury.
“Human sexual response is not totally dependent on having genital sensation or totally dependent on what one thinks of as traditional intercourse,” Cardenas said in a recent UWMC “Health Beat” article. “The brain really is the main sex organ of the body. Research shows that there are blood flow changes and activation in certain parts of the brain when people are engaged in sexual activity, showing that spinal cord injury doesn’t affect that part of the brain at all. A person has many ways to explore sexual satisfaction.”
Procreation is a repeating topic and one that proves the power of personal testimony. “Young folks get hurt; they want to have kids,” Hennig says. Naturally, many couples are interested in information on conception. From a statistical standpoint, the news is especially bleak for men, he says. But through the forum, he’s heard couples say that they were able to have children. “The beauty is that research may show one thing, but practicality may expand upon that and really provide a balance to what may otherwise be a depressing message,” he says. “Those speakers give hope and inspiration.”
More than two decades after his accident, Hennig is active and healthy and has relatively few complications from his injury. He lives in his own home (the house he bought just before his accident and has since remodeled), drives his own car and manages an independent life, with an assistant who comes in the morning to help him.
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