Jerry Haney, SCI Series, Spinal Column

I sincerely hope the information presented will be useful and help you and yours cope with this devastating injury.

If you do not find a subject shown here, please let me know and I will certainly try to research the information and present it on this website in continuing updates.

This important section is devoted to spinal cord injury, and includes information about the actual spinal cord injury, the changes that take place in the body, the spinal cord and what it does, the spinal column, differences in the type of spinal cord injury, the recovery process and terminology used when discussing SCI.

Even though the brain controls the majority of the activities of your body, it only extends down as far as the top of your neck. Beyond that, the spinal cord takes over and acts like telegraph wires for messages coming and going between the brain and all the other parts of your body. Your face has a direct connection to the brain stem, so it is independent of your spinal cord.

To look at it, the spinal cord is a long, rope-like cord about the width of your little finger. It runs from the base of your brain down to the lower part of your back and is fairly fragile. Damage to your spinal cord can affect your ability to move or feel. It can also affect the workings of some internal organs. If you are injured at a given level of your spinal cord, parts of your body will be affected at and below that level.

To avoid damage, the spinal cord is protected by bone — specifically, by your back bones. The back bones are 29 small bones stacked one on top of the other. These bones are called vertebrae. Because of all the jarring and bending your back must do, each vertebra is cushioned from the next by disks. Disks are made of spongy material that act on your back like shock absorbers do on your car. Ligaments hold the vertebrae together and allow your neck and back to twist and bend.

Each vertebra has a hole in it, so when stacked together with other vertebrae, they provide a hard, boney tunnel through which the spinal cord passes. This is called the spinal column. In this way, the cord is protected from the possibility of damage. (See figure)

There are four sections of your spine. The top is the cervical section, which makes up your neck. The next down is the thoracic section, which runs to just about the level of your waist. The lumbar level comes next and coincides with your lower back. And last but not least is the sacral part, down around your seat and tailbone. (See figure)

There are eight pairs of nerves and seven vertebrae in the cervical section of your spine. In this case, the nerves numbered Cl through C7 are above the corresponding numbered vertebrae. C8 then slips through between the C7 and Ti bones.

For the thoracic and lumbar sections, each of the numbered nerves lies below the corresponding numbered vertebra. There are 12 thoracic vertebrae and 5 lumbar vertebrae.

At the lower end of your spinal cord (below the second lumbar vertebra), the nerves coming out do not match up exactly with the bones in your back. This is because the spinal cord itself ends much higher than where your tailbone marks the lower end of your backbone.

This makes the lower lumbar and sacral nerves look like a horse’s tail inside the spinal column, It is known as the cauda equina, which means "horse’s tail" in Latin.

Your sacral section is really only one piece of bone with five nerve pairs coming out through holes in it..