Why do caregivers of someone with a spinal cord injury need to be trained before leaving the hospital?

The primary reason is because if you wait until you go home, whose going to train you? You’ve got home-health nurses, but a lot of the time home-health nurses don’t know as much as they should about somebody with a spinal cord injury. So as much as training as you can give that family member—whether it’s the wife, the mom, the brother, the sister—before they go home, it’s going to make the transition a lot easier. We all know that being in a rehab hospital, that’s a wonderful and glorious setting, but when you go home, things are different. You don’t have six-foot-wide halls; you don’t have a bathroom that has a roll-in shower. What you’ve learned to do in the rehab hospital is a good thing but sometimes when you get home, it’s not going to work. So they’ve got to train the caregivers as much as they can.

Caregivers should be trained before leaving the hospital and receive all of the wonderful education manuals that are out there by the way, with pictures, explanations. Once again, you shouldn’t just say, “Here’s your training course, that was five minutes and we’re done.” It should be over time with an individual, at the bedside if it needs to be, asking all the questions that you have and then sending them home with their resources. Because first of all, it’s very frightening to do bodily invasion, everybody can figure out how to bathe somebody, but the fear of hurting your loved one is enormous. So people tend to not push a catheter far enough because that might hurt someone, that kind of thing. So it’s very important to be trained in very specific things. Better to try it under adult supervision and medical supervision than totally stressed out when you go home.