My name is Chris Lawrence, I'm a 44-year-old man with spina bifida. I'm not involved with any organizations, I mainly use Facebook to reach out to people with spina bifida who may be struggling. I have had well over 70 surgeries. My passion is helping people with spina bifida transition from child to adult care. Adult care for spina bifida can be a real pain to navigate, so many people I have met just can’t see a doctor that knows how to treat it.

Most of our treatments involve surgeries on the bladder and bowels to achieve continence. So most doctors know nothing of neurogenic bowel and neurogenic bladder. Those types of doctors may recommend high fiber, and that is of no help to us.

I advocate for something called a mitrofanoff for the bladder. a mitrofanoff is an opening in the belly button that leads to the bladder, a catheter is then inserted into the belly button to empty the bladder and curing incontinence. the next surgery that I advocate for it's called a mace. Emmaus is another opening on the belly that leads into the very beginning of the large intestine called the cecum. a catheter is inserted into that hole and most people we'll run 500ml of saline and maybe 20 to 60 mL of glycerin. this causes the bowels to be flushed out from the top down as it is just too difficult for people with spina bifida to do regular enemas.

So those are two surgeries that a lot of people with spina bifida may not have access to because they may not even know about them.

the Spina Bifida Association is opening up a new chapter in North East Ohio and I do plan on having some involvement in that seeing as it would be local to me.

Another topic I discuss from time to time is bullying in schools. I was bullied growing up a lot in school. I do not look back at my school days fondly and I ended up using drugs to cope. Drug use did not continue after high school.

I hope I gave you some decent info this time!