What adaptations and equipment help with cooking after a spinal cord injury? - Sarah Harrison, OT

Depending on what level of spinal cord injury you have—let’s say you have a C7 or C6 injury where you don’t necessarily have control of your fingers—we use  a lot of rocker knifes to cut things. I also do a lot of adaptations to scissors to help with managing different packaging that you might need to cook something. I also really, really like a tool called “The Gripper”. It’s a custom made, wrist activated reacher and that can be so helpful for getting items from high cabinetry, or even opening the refrigerator and getting something from the drawer. What it does is when you extend your wrist; it closes the end of the reacher. So it’s an awesome tool—it’s lightweight and it’s custom made to fit someone’s forearm and it’s made to put on on their own.