Autonomic Dysreflexia

Quad2020

I keep having episodes of what seems to be autonomic dysreflexia, I have a non- traumatic C5 spinal cord injury. As a result of it being a non-traumatic injury no one ever mentioned AD as a possible problem I might encounter. Sometimes I have been able to find the problem (usually bladder related) and then my blood pressure will normalize. However twice lately I have not been able to find the cause and my blood pressure was high and I was experiencing lots of symptoms for several hours straight. I don’t know what kind of doctor or healthcare professional to bring this up to, since my primary care doctor doesn’t seem to know much about spinal cord injuries and I am not in spinal rehab (or anything like that). Any advice would greatly be appreciated. 

heatherkrill

Our primary care doctor is embarrassingly also inexperienced with spinal cord injuries, and my husband HATES going for any reason.  However for the last two years, his urologist acted instead of his primary care and was awesome.  Sadly, he moved away this spring so we also feel back to square one given our rural location.  However, it might benefit you to send an email to your local hospital's human resource dept to find out if anyone who works there did any kind of rotation with spinal cord injured patients during medical school.  This was how we lucked out with the urologist.  Good luck.  I'm sorry not to be more helpful.