A decade of pain and frustration

Injury took nine years to diagnose

- 

FOR almost a decade Ceri Love carried the pain in her head.

"I couldn't tell anybody because I thought they'll think I'm faking it," she recalled.

The now 64-year-old Bristolian sustained a spinal cord injury after a car accident in April 1991. However, it took nine years for her to be told the extent of her injury, leading to years of frustration and inappropriate medical treatment.

After the crash, Ceri, pictured right, experienced numbness in her left leg, difficulty moving, and burning pain. Despite being told that a discectomy would ease her symptoms, she continued to lose sensation, bladder and bowel function, and mobility, leading to two further surgeries.

Ceri had not been told that she had cauda equina syndrome, a compression of the lower spine that causes a spinal cord injury. In Ceri's case, the effects of her injury are lifelong, but she was instead led to believe that she had a bad back that would improve with physiotherapy.

For the next nine years, Ceri raised her children as a single mother, working on a university diploma and then university degree, and establishing a career that would allow her to help other people, all while managing her disability without appropriate support.