Menstruation to Menopause – A Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) Woman’s Journey
To register for our Menstruation to Menopause webinars please email: events@boltburdonkemp.co.uk
This May and June the Spinal Injury Team at Bolt Burdon Kemp are delighted to be hosting a series of free Women’s Health webinars in partnership with the Spinal Injuries Association.
Covering everything from Menstruation to Menopause and beyond(!) these webinars are aimed at SCI women to inform and open the discussion around topics which are routinely overlooked. Whether you are tetraplegic, paraplegic, complete, incomplete of or have Cauda Equina Syndrome, this seminar series is for you!
The main purpose of this mini blog however, is to take a look at why we are doing this. Well, it all started when one of our team was talking to an acquaintance who has a spinal cord injury. She said that when she went to see a fertility doctor to discuss having a baby, the doctor asked her ‘can you have children with your spinal injury?’. We found that truly shocking (as did she!).
Afterwards we set about making enquiries with other women who had sustained an SCI at different ages to ask about their experiences of women’s sexual and reproductive health. The responses continued to shock and sadden us.
For some, questions they asked about periods, sex, intimacy or the menopause were met with silence. One young client felt unable to discuss such personal matters with her male spinal consultant and had no female equivalent to ask. Another reported that she attended an event on sex and SCI during her inpatient stay at a rehabilitation unit only to discover that it was almost exclusively aimed at men, despite being advertised for all.
All of this left us feeling that we had to do something to help improve this situation; and so we came up with the idea of running a series of webinars for SCI women, tackling these issues head on. We put together a programme of topics we felt needed discussing and with the support of the Spinal Injuries Association we were able to bring together a fantastic panel of professional speakers and SCI community members with lived experiences. Starting on 5th May, each webinar will be approximately 1 hour long and will include the opportunity to ask questions. People can sign up to the whole series or individual webinars.
So if you can recall being in a district hospital, spinal unit or at the GP asking questions where the answers were unknown or where topics were just not discussed then please attend! Don’t miss out on this fantastic opportunity to hear more information on the important but woefully under-resourced topics.
