Describe an injury. Some learners will use the same injury, such as a fall off of a horse. Describe how the patient experienced both primary and secondary injuries. Be sure to describe symptoms, implications, and testing that helped clinicians to classify the injury into these categories.

Primary and Secondary Injury The injuries like motor vehicle accidents, sport injuries, violence, or fall can lead to injury in the spinal cord. Among them, the leading cause of the spinal injuries are motor vehicle crashes (Huether & McCance, 2021). The spinal injury has been classified into two types, primary and secondary depending upon the severity and time of development. The patient can experience both types, in case of a traumatic injury like a car accident. The primary injury will be caused immediately after the traumatic event if spine is not completely immobilised. Most of the time, there is a dislocation or fracture of vertebrae, myelin degeneration, oedema, altered axon transport or spinal tissues get torn (Huether & McCance, 2021). In primary injury, we can observe certain symptoms like spinal shock, hypoxia, vasospasm, hypotension, hypo-perfusion, spinal shock etc. The implications of primary injuries are, disrupted blood vessels, damage to ascending and descending pathways, fractures, blood pressure variations etc. (Alizadeh et al., 2019). Testing can be done by X-Rays, MRI, and CT scan techniques and can be treated by surgery (Alizadeh et al., 2019). The secondary injury starts after a few minutes of primary injury and continues for weeks or months (Huether & McCance, 2021). There is a progressive damage in the spinal cord (Alizadeh et al., 2019). In this, we can observe the symptoms like inability to regulate blood pressure, ischemia or infarction, paralysis in the arms, lung problems, loss of bowel control, sexual dysfunction etc. (Spinal Cord Injury: Types, Symptoms, Causes & Treatment, n.d.) Apart from this, the implications of secondary injury that cause these symptoms are because of the accumulation of sodium ions, lipid peroxidation, oxidative stress, excitotoxicity, axonal damage, inflammation in the neuron and other cellular changes including cell death (Alizadeh et al., 2019). Testing can be done by micro dialysis to check for the elevated levels of glutamate in the white matter (Alizadeh et al., 2019). Motor functions and sensory functions can also be checked. Reference Alizadeh, A., Dyck, S., & Abdolrezaee, S. (2019, March 22). Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury: An Overview of Pathophysiology, Models and Acute Injury Mechanisms. Frontiers. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2019.00282/full#:%7E:text=Overview%20of%20Secondary%20Mechanisms%20of,Allen%20in%201911%20(87) Huether, E. S., & McCance, L. K. (2021, August 6). Understanding Pathophysiology, 7th Edition. Spinal Cord Injury: Types, Symptoms, Causes & Treatment. (n.d.). Cleveland Clinic. Retrieved October 5, 2022, from https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/12098-spinal-cord-injury