Exercising is one of the best ways to handle pain and increase strength to move around. There is a lot you can do with your arms using small weights which can protect them from constant pushing your wheelchair around. There are two things you need to always keep in mind:

1) Try to get the most strength out of an exercise. It should not be too easy or you will not get anything out of it.

2) Make sure  you do not hurt yourself. Over extending  yourself is an excellent way to tear a muscle or a tendon. Then you have to take it easy until t hat heals which can slow down your exercise program.

Also make sure that any rehab training you are doing is safe. I was transferred to a trainee with no other instructors around and he ended up tearing both of my rotator cups. Don’t let this happen to you. If the pain is increasing to the point that you are having a hard time pushing through, stop regardless of what the instructor says. It is your body and any mistakes they make you have to live with. It should be a little tough to move the weights around, but not a massive strain. Repetitive moves will help most for cardiac exercise to get the blood moving. Unless you are trying to gain bulk in yoiur arms it make sense to do lots of repetitions with small weights. This will give you a lean body and good tone. This is something that we could all use.

The third big thing is food. Don’t get into eating non-stop at McDonalds or Burger King. These are high fat foods that were never designed to be lived off of and will make it difficult to lose all that weight. THis is on top of any weight that is gained because of the myriad of drugs we take to stay alive. There are many drugs that have increased weight as a contra-indication. Try to eat healthy foods that are easy to digest, especially for those on pain killers. Pain Killers dramatically slow down the bowel and can cause all kinds of medical problems. Try to eat things that will help the bowel move including prunes, prune juice or any high fiber fruit. Also try to reduce the spicy food as that can cause hemmorrhoids that are hard to shrink and are painful to deal with.

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We finally are being seen as regular people that just cannot get up from a chair. For too many years the disabled have been looked at as broken. The broken people somehow need to be "repaired" by the able bodied that have no idea what the are doing. A disability does not define who a person is, just a circumstance that put them where the are now. It continues to be a constant process to treat the disabled as anyone else you meet. I have run into several people that treat me like I am two years old and talk to me when they walk up to me. It is very hard not to blast them and let them know that I am a college graduate that matriculated Alpha Chi – in the top 3% of all classes. My legs do not control my brain or what I am capable of doing. It is no fun being thrown out of a store because I have a service dog, but things are getting better. The ADA gives us tools to make companies ease entry to their building and allow service animals to be welcomed. Here is to one day rolling in my chair and the public seeing a person shopping rather than a strange occura ce with the small minded starring and gawking.