Still Falling
I fell again, this time a hard fall, from my chair to slipping off my bed. Since day one, I never could get back in the chair from the floor – I flunked OT 101 – and in my current wonky condition, not a chance. I struggled like a beached whale to try to maneuver close enough to grab the trapeze bar dangling over the bed, but just ended up more frustrated and sweating like a, you know, beached whale. Demoralized, I just sat there, feeling helpless and ashamed. Finally my wife came home and weighing in at 119, there wasn’t much she could do. The next door neighbor hustled over and the two of them got me up high enough where I could grab the bar and finish the job.
I have memorized the stats. Falling is the leading cause of fatal and non-fatal injuries for older Americans. One out of four Americans 65 and over fall each year. And most of those are ambulatory citizens, not us wheelchaired afficionados. So lying there in bed, exhausted, I knew this s**t had to stop. I wasn’t worried about dying from a head wound. I was worried about the damage to my self-worth. “What happened? Did he die from the fall? No, he loathed himself to death.”
So I wrote my good friend and fellow blogger, Tim Gilmer, a man who has been paralyzed since, as my mother used to say, Jesus was a pup. We are both 78 and I look to him for moments of inspiration and guidance. He immediately called me and lo and behold, he had just fallen himself and was also stumped about what to do. Though he is operating with the loss of half a leg, Tim is much more agile and resourceful than I am and if he is prone to falling, too, he must have searched for an answer.
As we both agreed, slide boards are a useful aid in many situations. Tim had come across a very nifty board that was a slide board on top of a slide board. The bottom board stayed fixed while another board on top moved you back and forth. It sounded great except for one problem. I always need another person to situate the board and make sure it doesn’t accidently slide off one of the two surfaces involved and I go down.
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Though we live in radically different environments -- Tim in the country and me in LA. – we have many of the same age-related problems. Like driving. I have stopped driving. Tim has stopped, too, but he is trying to reclaim it, get back to it. I can get a Lyft Van on occasion for $25. Not cheap, but compared to Tim, a bargain. Neither Lyft nor Uber will venture out to Tim’s farm. The last time he needed to get to an in-town appointment, it cost him in excess of $100. Shoulder and arm weakness is another mutual concern.
I found a solution to falling at home that’s a true blessing. Scrolling through Amazon, I came across an electric chair lift that lifts me off the floor and goes up 22”, i.e., bed height. It ain’t cheap but I see it as a lifetime investment. Just sitting in the corner of the room, I swear, it’s boosted my confidence. Haven’t fallen once since it arrived. It did save me when a power outage sucked all the air out of my air mattress. It earned its stripes.
I ended my call to Tim when I looked out the window and saw my home care nurse, Gigi, pulling up. When I told Tim this, his reply: “Well, how about that? So is my home care nurse!”
Great minds, and old crips, indeed think alike.