I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up
There use to be a very funny commercial with some elderly woman on the kitchen floor pressing a small transmitting device that she wore around her neck which would announce to some emergency service or other that she had fallen in her home and that she was unable to get up. Naturally, there was nothing really funny about the situation since that happens all too often to the elderly, especially those that lived alone, but the low grade nature of the TV commercial combined with the normal human response to laugh at other people’s dilemmas, especially those of the slip and fall variety, made it seem funny and made the expression, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” an iconic comment that we inject at fun moments for a quick laugh.
As we age, there is less and less funny about an unexpected fall and an inability to get up and the risk of bodily harm seems all the greater to us. My friend Gary once fell doing what I jokingly call the underwear dance, except that he broke his upper femur and was hospitalized for far too long while his bones mended and he was rehabilitated enough to be able to walk. There was very little funny about that, but I will say that I think about it almost every time I put on my underwear, making sure to be close to a wall to lean on so that I do not succumb to the same fate. In his case, Gary, who spent his adult life at 6’4” and 180 pounds, was deemed to have somewhat brittle bones that were more prone to breakage with age. I am led to believe that given the more extreme weight-bearing nature of my bones, that I am much less likely to have brittle bones that would break quite so easily, but I still do not want to test this theory by falling unnecessarily. I certainly know, just from getting on the mat to do stretches and then getting up that if and when I am prone and on the ground, getting up is a bigger chore than it used to be, so there is that for sure.
Several years ago, my friend Bruce raised some money for an old childhood friend of his who was starting a business to make an App for cell phones that would provide an alert for slip and fall emergencies. You cannot turn the pages of an AARP magazine without seeing ten ads for such devices of varying form, including the now old-fashioned transmitter button that hangs around your neck. They all do some version of the alert protocol and now they almost all utilize the ubiquity of the cell phones we are all connected by to send that alert. Apple even builds such an alert mechanism into their Apple Watch, one of which I have and wear, so I’m not so sure that Bruce’s friend’s App is either all that unique or all that necessary at the margin. Like so many medical devices, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but the parade may have very well just passed it by at this point. I expect to get notice sometime soon that I should most likely write-of that particular bad investment.
Yesterday I got it in my head that after the torrential rains we had this past weekend, it would be a good spring project for me to buy some decomposed granite (DG) to put down on my lower pathways on the back hillside. There is one path in particular that gets undue erosion and a replenishment of the DG on it would make it look better. Raking those pathways and putting down added DG is something I have done before, so I know pretty much what to do. So, yesterday, after my stretch session, I stopped at my favorite rock store and had them load up 600 pounds of stabilized desert gold DG in fifty pound bags into my truck. For good measure, I also bought three flats of blue candlestick succulents to plant on one particular spot on the back hillside that I thought could use a bit more ground cover.
My method was then to unload the 50 pound bags of DG from the truck into my electric wheelbarrow and take it around to the Cecil Garden. I know that I can get that electric wheelbarrow down the hillside on that side, but not without trouble, but I took a chapter our of Joventino’s book and used the regular wheelbarrow to take the bags from the Cecil Garden down to the lower pathway that needed the DG in three trips, so as to minimize the damage to the path from the much heavier electric wheelbarrow. This was a good idea, but I will say that it was more work than I remember and it was a little more precarious than I recall both in terms of the weight of the wheelbarrow and the trickiness of the footing of the slow descent. I found myself thinking about not falling more than I expected to, especially since I am nursing a sore a hip. I have self-diagnosed my sore left hip as a case of Greater Trochanteric Bursitis pain syndrome, which is an inflammation of the bursa fluid sac on that side of the hip. The good news of this evil-sounding affliction is that it does go away if you use ice and heat on it and generally do not aggravate it by overuse of the squatting nature. I realized half way through the DG transportation task that walking downhill with a heavy wheelbarrow was exactly the sort of aggravation that the medical websites were warning me against. It was a bit too late to stop the process, so I finished the task, leaving the spreading and raking of the DG for later today.
Today, I will go down to that lower pathway and spread that 600 pounds of stabilized desert gold DG on that path and rake it out to a nice looking condition. I will also plant those three flats of blue candlestick succulents and consider my gardening project complete. I am hoping that lifting, opening and spreading a dozen fifty pound bags of DG will offer my sore hip less distress than the downhill wheelbarrow situation did yesterday, but I will only know once I am doing it. I know that spending several hours hefting fifty pound bags of anything is worthy of a good weightlifting workout, so I will take it slowly, especially since today is the day I go for my weight training at the gym and I will likely be more done in than usual. I am far more cautious than not when I traipse up and down my back hillside and I know that I simply do not want to fall and be unable to get up. As it was, Kim went looking for me yesterday (I had left in my truck for my stretch without telling her) and I suspect that when she saw the bags of DG on the hillside and couldn’t find me, she may have thought I had done some version of the slip and fall program.
Last night we watched a movie called As They Made Us that was about a somewhat dysfunctional family where the father, played by an 85-year-old Dustin Hoffman, opened the show with an “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” episode. In that case, Candace Bergen plays his not-so-always-loving wife who lets him lie on the floor unassisted for several hours before calling their daughter to come and help him. It was a sad story about the decline we all sooner or later go through in old age. It was just the ticket for me after my excessive back hillside weight lifting exercise. It all made me see the benefits of getting hit by a truck rather than suffer the ignominious physical decline of old age. It didn’t help that in the show, Hoffman is supposed to be 73 years old rather than his actual 85, but at least that reminded me that we all go into decline at different ages and that the trick is to be as aware as you can be of your changing limitations. I think I will take it easy hefting those bags of DG later today.