Daily Life with a C4/C5 Spinal Cord Injury

Short breaks away from home are just the tonic!

Home life can become quite mundane at times and, having exciting opportunites to look forward to and focus on can help.

It’s September so a time for us to embark on a short break to Center Parcs. We chose Longleat this time; we’ve been several times before and it’s closer to home than the other Parcs.

We stayed in a Woodland Adapted Lodge – Pine 251 – which was very close to The Plaza housing the subtropical swimming paradise, restaurants, coffee shop, ten pin bowling venue, supermarket and other shops. The lodge was on the flat with a designated parking space right outside. It was perfect! Three bedroom, one being a twin with adjustable bed. We had a large accessible wet room, additional bathroom and a 3rd toilet! Plenty of space in the open plan lounge area for wheelchair access.

Center Parcs kindly provided us with a shower wheelchair, mobile hoist and an air mattress and made no additional charge for this. The standard bed, while adjustable and with bed rails, is not on wheels; next time we will consider requesting a profiling bed for ease of providing care.

We visited most areas with ease. The land train is not accessible for larger wheelchairs and we could have driven the car around the site if needed, although we chose not to on this occasion.

Restuarants:

Las Iguanas – excellent service; staff allowed us to choose where we sat and we could consider which tables gave a little more height for wheelchair access, and where we could access toilet facilities with ease.

Cafe Rouge – as above. We had a large round table which gave us ample space to spread out.

Foresters Inn – probably the best for table height and space between table legs! Plenty of space around the table for movement in and out and accessing the toilets.

What did we get up to??? Well, the forest is an amazing place to explore and enjoy the fresh air, so we didn’t need much entertainment! However, we did try some falconry which was amazing! Smaller birds due to limited flying space so easier for dad to manage, although the staff stayed close by!!

We also went ten pin bowling; staff asked us to wait 10 minutes so we could benefit from a bigger space which we were grateful for. Plenty of frames available for those unable to hold a bowling ball comfortably.

And of course we went swimming!!! We booked an accessible cabana but we’ll not do that again. It was up an incline and through the café – not easy to get to when pushing a chair or trying to manoeuvre through tables and chairs. The cabana itself was a 6 person accessible. We were 4 plus wheelchair user. It was too small and cluttered. We did the transfer from wheelchair to pool chair outside the cabana as it was simply too small; this then provides no privacy, the whole reason for booking it.

The pool wheelchair we were provided felt damaged and unsafe; the wheels were quite wobbly and the whole thing creaked as we tried pushing it along. We got a replacement but this was worse. Not wanting to disappoint we opted for dad to use his own wheelchair to the poolside and we used the pool chair the shortest distance possible and made the pool staff aware of the chair issues.

Further disappointment arose when the water was simply too cold. We made the most of it but left the pool after around 40 minutes. The lazy river was great, as always and we giggled our way around several times. Dad wore his own lift vest and laid in a floaty net which we bought from Amazon for about £6 – bargain buy! It took 4 of us to safely navigate him around the lazy river but we had such fun!

A four night break was just what we all needed to reset and get back on with normal day to day life. Dad had 4 of us caring for him at different times and each providing something different.

Already looking forward to our next visit.