Legends of the Falls
The Ups and Downs (and Downs and Downs) of My Life
My personal history of falling has become legendary. This is partly because I’ve done it so frequently, and partly because the falls themselves are too often rather spectacular. I learned the meaning of the word “klutz” at a very early age.
The Firsts
Two of my earliest memories involve falling, or the resulting damage. The first was when I was five, and I broke my arm while jumping down from a middle rung of a friend’s jungle gym.
I distinctly remember thinking that I should not jump straight out, because there was a sandbox there, and if I hit that, I’d break my neck. So I jumped at an angle. And broke my arm.
Things are fuzzy after that, though I do remember my pediatrician later being annoyed with me because he had to reapply the plaster to the elbow of my cast multiple times because I kept moving it around too much.
The other was when I fell out of bed when I was six. Not a long fall, again, but when you fall onto a china tea set that shatters when you hit it, the distance isn’t the problem.
The two memories from that are my hysterical shrieks while getting 26 stitches in my hip, and coming home, unable to sleep, to discover that there just isn’t that much on TV at 2am (it was the early 70’s, the era of 5 channels to choose from and a test pattern on all of them in the wee hours of the morning).
A Tale of Two Bikes
This is another two-fer, in a way. Both incidents were because of bicycles, and both were less than a year apart from each other.
Exhibit A: I was riding home from school near the beginning of 9th grade. (Bear in mind that this was during an era when both cell phones and bike helmets were not a thing.)
I was running late, so I found a pay phone to call my parents so they wouldn’t worry. But I was still in a hurry, so I stood up on the pedals to get them going faster. I’d done that a million times without issue. The difference this time was that I was wearing my overloaded backpack, which shifted and pulled me off balance. The front wheel turned as I crashed into a brick wall next to me.
Out of all my falls over the years, that was my only ambulance ride. My parents met me at the hospital, where they took stock of the damage:
Four stitches in the corner of my mouth, a bit of whiplash, a knot on one eyebrow that has never truly gone away, and the pièce de résistance — my two front teeth had been knocked out when the bike’s handlebar slammed into my face right under my nose. My parents had thought about getting those teeth capped for a while anyway, to take care of the gap that I hated with a passion.
In the end, the biggest consequence was that the two days of school that I missed were the two days that we learned the number row in Typing class. To this day, I can touch type reasonably well, but always have to look where the numbers are.
Exhibit B: the following summer, I was riding a bike again, this time with a friend. We came to a hill, and she suggested we walk our bikes down instead of riding them. I rejected this idea, because I felt like I had to prove to myself that I wasn’t scared.
Did I mention this was a country dirt road, with considerable gravel in the mix?
There was no ambulance this time. We were several hours drive from the nearest hospital, and the damage wasn’t life threatening. I had substantial road rash on my arms and face, and shattered one of my caps.
I remember not looking in a mirror for the rest of the summer, but by the first day of school, I looked reasonably presentable. I’ve learned my lesson and (mostly) avoided bikes since then.
Just One Step
When my first child was a few months old, I was going to our basement with a basket of laundry, and my feet got tangled in the hem of my bathrobe on the very bottom step.
Again, the distance you fall isn’t the point; it’s the damage. A broken toe later, I had a lovely boot and could hobble around without too much trouble.
The reason this one was memorable was that I was in a wedding two days later. To say that the boot clashed with my knee-length dress is like saying Noah got a bit of drizzle.
The photographer told me to walk very slowly when I came down the aisle, and to his credit, he got a shot where the boot was completely hidden by my other leg.
The Big One
When I was in my mid-forties, I used to go for a walk every morning. I loved it. I would go out early in the morning and walk for an hour. I listened to my favorite music and was always in a good mood by the time I got home.
One lovely August morning, I was crossing a bigger road. There had recently been some construction nearby, and I didn’t notice the bits of debris that were here and there. You know what’s coming.
Yep, Pitched straight forward, on the edge of a road where the speed limit was 40 miles per hour.
I scrambled back to the sidewalk, and a Good Samaritan stopped her car and offered to drive me home. I thanked her but declined. It was barely four blocks, which wouldn’t take very long.
By the time I’d walked those blocks, tears were streaming down my face. Not so much because of the pain, which was growing rapidly, but because I knew.
I knew a trip to the ER was in order. Again.
My husband drove us, and after getting X-rays, we looked at the film while waiting to see the doctor again. I’d gotten some very good meds by then, and was much more cheerful. We agreed that we couldn’t see anything on the film, so maybe it wasn’t broken after all.
The doctor smiled at us kindly. “Oh, no, it’s broken for sure, but I can’t put a cast it.”
That didn’t make sense, so she explained that if the bones healed in an offset position, it would affect future mobility.
She flexed her hand, bending the wrist in various directions. “Can you do that with your good hand?” I nodded miserably — once again, I knew what was coming. “If you want to be able to do that with both hands, you’ll need to have surgery to pin the bone in place so it doesn’t slide while healing. The surgeon has cleared a space for you tomorrow morning.”
That shut me up rather abruptly. When someone clears space, they aren’t messing around. This was more serious than most of my other injuries. We returned the following morning, where I got a nerve block. Soon there was zero pain.
A nurse asked how I was doing, and I gleefully replied, “It’s GREAT! It’s like I don’t even HAVE an arm!”
It truly felt like I had a mannequin arm attached to my shoulder. It doesn’t sound like a pleasant thing, but at that moment, it was bliss.
After being wheeled into surgery, I barely had time to register that getting the general anesthesia injection hurt. The next thing I knew, my husband was sitting next to me in the recovery room.
As soon as I opened my eyes, he said enthusiastically, “Honey, you’re like the Terminator!” and showed me my latest X-rays.
I deliver a better laser beam death stare than any Terminator, but once I looked at the pictures, I had to concede he wasn’t too far off the mark.
When I got my cast, I chose bubblegum pink as the color, and later had a friend use a Sharpie to draw on it. My henna-inspired cast got multiple compliments. The nurse who removed it even admired it, making a point of cutting it so that the design wasn’t damaged.
A Note
These are not all the falls I’ve had; far from it. There’s the time I fell from
- my front porch (2 steps)
- the side door (1 step)
- my friend’s porch on the way to my car before an 8-hour drive home (2 steps)
- a bit of sidewalk outside Target (maybe an inch?) when I learned that a bruised rib and a cracked rib have the same treatment (time and rest). This was actually tripping, not falling, but the result means that I still count it.
- and many more!.
But I haven’t had a big fall since that last time I broke my arm (now is when I frantically knock on any available wood, including my own head, and apologize to the Universe for my hubris and braggadocio).
What has kept me out of the ER? I’m not sure.
I’m certainly older, but I can’t claim to be wiser. I can only chalk it up to dumb luck, and wait for the other shoe to drop.
In my path.
Where I will most assuredly trip over it.
