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Things, I swiftly discovered, wound themselves up from 6 a.m. onward, in preparation for the 7 a.m. handover, when the nurses’ twelve-and a half-hour-night shift switched with the twelve-and-a-half-hour day shift. There is a grim unforgiving routine when you have paralysed bladder and bowels. Conveyor-belt stuff. The nurses detached our overnight urine drainage bags, great wobbling two-litre plastic bags of yellow fluid collected from indwelling catheters, and emptied them down the loo. Before handover, in the dawn light, they would leave us our little morning package of delight, anal suppositories wrapped up in an incontinence pad, on the ends of our beds. ‘Are your supps in?’ echoed the cry.

Paraplegics, whose arms and hands were not paralysed, were taught to reach behind their backs to their bottom and shove their own up. Tetraplegics like me, who could neither hold nor reach, had to wait to have the nurse do it. A few minutes after insertion, as the suppositories began to do their work, our semi-naked bodies, big, small, and everything in between, were hoisted onto commode-style shower chairs and wheeled into the bathroom one after another, to be poised over the loo until our bowels delivered. There was a critical time balance as to how long you waited. Left in bed too long, you would poo on the sheets or, worse, in the hoist; or perhaps even dump upon the floor through the hole in the shower chair seat en route to the bathroom. Too short a time, and you would sit for what seemed like hours over the loo, waiting for the splash that told you something had happened. It was the only way to tell. You had no feeling.