How do most patients learn the nature of their spinal cord injury and what it means? - Kristine Cichowski, MS

We often find that there's a learning moment, and you can't quite get to that learning moment if the person is not ready to hear you. And usually, I have found, that fear is what gets in your way. It's a very frightening thing to be faced with a spinal cord injury; your life is changed in an instant. It's like someone takes a rug and just pulls it right out from underneath you, and now you're left with a whole new situation. Nobody asks for that, it just happens. And, it can be scary, you don't know the future. And particularly if you've never had experience with someone with a spinal cord injury, or had an opportunity to see the possibilities of life beyond spinal cord injury, it can be pretty scary.