Oddly specific question but my brother was recently diagnosed with blood cancer after being rushed to the hospital
In the space of about 2 days he went from being totally fine to being unable to walk due to the tumours on his spine and is now looking at an 18 month time frame before he can walk properly again
Literally the day before he went to hospital he was stood playing beatsaber on VR.
In: Biology
Think of the spinal column as the main highway for the nervous system in your body. Normally, everything flows fine and you don’t notice any issues. But if something happens that interrupts that flow, such as tumors putting pressure on the nerves or damage from an accident, suddenly your brain cannot communicate with parts of your body, leading to numbness or even paralysis.
A tumor doesn’t just paralyze you by existing in your spine, it has to interfere with your spinal cord somehow. Nerves are pretty small, so it may not take that long for a tumor to grow or swell from barely touching, to putting pressure on, to cutting off all communication through a given nerve. Tumors can also secrete hormones and waste products and such that can build up and have other various effects, but that gets a bit more complicated.
I’m reminded of a story from a vet clinic. They had a client with a dog that would become paralyzed for a while before recovering fully, seemingly at random. They’d brought him in a few times and couldn’t find anything really wrong, thinking he might just be faking it for food or whatever, until one time he went paralyzed during an exam as soon as another dog came into the clinic, and recovered when they left. The vet then ordered some other tests, and found the dog did have a small tumor in his spine, not big enough to cause problems normally, but composed of erectile tissue. He was essentially getting a tiny boner in his spine, which would compress his spinal cord and paralyze him until it went away. They removed it, and he was fine.
Adding to what others wrote: as the tumor grows it also frequently compromises the blood flow in that area of the spinal cord. If someone has a fairly sudden decline in this setting, they are often found to have a spinal cord infarct (ie a stroke of the spinal cord) rather than just nerve damage from the compressive force of the growth.
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