Tag Archives: falling down

Gravity, Like Karma, Is a Bitch

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Gravity and I have quite a history. We’re not friends, to say the least.

Some of our disagreements resulted in little more than damage to my dignity. (Not that I have much of that to begin with.) I land on my amply padded ass and sustain no physical injuries.

My head, however, is not so lucky. When I was a kid, I liked to hang upside down on the monkey bars by my feet. (Yes, by my feet.) As you might guess, my feet slipped, and I succumbed to gravity, landing on my head. I remember thinking falling wasn’t so bad, but that was before I hit the ground. (This was back in the day when playground supervision was less rigorous, and playground surfacing meant asphalt. I didn’t even get rushed to the emergency room afterward. But I digress.)

Over the years, from childhood to my adult years, I have honed my falling skills and my disagreements with gravity to a fine point. I have fallen off a horse and off cross-country skis. I have fallen out of car doors and tripped into a chair I was carrying. (Gravity snickered at that one and gave me a fat lip the day before my ballet recital. The ballet was supposed to make me more graceful. That worked well. My parents should have gotten their money back. But I digress again.)

It was almost exactly one year ago that I went “under the knife” and got a bionic knee, or at least a snazzy chrome one. My adaptation to new ways of standing, sitting, balancing, and walking took rather a long time. At six weeks, when my friends who’d also had their knees replaced were ready to get their other knee done, I was still falling down. A lot. Eventually, I admitted I needed help, and the emergency squad took me to the ER, where they did imaging to make sure the robo-knee was still firmly in place. (It was.)

One of my gravity fails, however, was spectacular enough that I broke the two little bones that stick out on either side of the ankle. (That day, I learned a lot about controlled substances. The EMTs gave me fentanyl to get me to the ER, and the ER personnel gave me ketamine to “reduce” the fracture (put the bones roughly into place before pins and plates were inserted to keep them there). But I digress some more.)

I don’t remember any untoward effects of the fentanyl. (The EMTs and I joked about prices for it in various parking lots around town.) The ketamine had definite psychedelic effects. Everything began to look like various colored blocks and cubes, as if I were in the Minecraft movie. Everything returned to normal fairly quickly, and I was whisked off to surgery to get my new hardware.

Let me tell you, if you’ve ever thought wearing an arm sling was awkward and annoying, it’s nothing compared to using a walker with a knee sling, if you’re not allowed to put any weight on the damaged foot. It involves flinging yourself up from a chair onto your one good foot and lurching with your other knee towards a piece of fabric. Even ballerinas would find it lacks grace.

Right now, I’m at an awkward, in-between stage when it comes to walking. Travel requires a good deal of planning and switching among mobility aids. Until this past week, to go out, I needed to take a wheelchair down a ramp to get out of the house and to the car, and a walker to get from the car to the destination’s door. Now, the wheelchair and the ramp are gone, but I need a cane to negotiate the front steps and then the walker to get to the car. And I can’t carry one while using the other. I’m trying to figure out how to manage the process on my own so I can travel independently. It’s frustrating.

But by now my motto is the old saying: Fall down seven times. Get up eight. And gravity can go to hell.

Walkin’ the Walk

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Babies learn to walk by stumbling around with a Frankenstein gait and frequently falling on their padded butts. And people think it’s cute.

Me, not so much. (It’s true that I have an amply padded butt, but it’s not sufficient to cushion a fall from my height to the floor. Which has happened to me fairly frequently since I had my knee replacement in late April. But I digress.)

The reason this all occurs to me is that I have had to learn to walk all over again. And I don’t look cute as I waddle and toddle and go boom. The going boom part has necessitated stays in the hospital and the post-acute rehab facility (aka nursing home). At least there was someone there to pick me up when I did go boom.

(Dan did fairly well when I boomed at home. (Yes, we’re both boomers. Like that was any secret. But I digress parenthetically.) But he has to work and wasn’t available for eight hours a day, which made us both very nervous. Fortunately, he was home when I fell and broke one ankle in two places. But I digress some more.)

But everything has changed—or is, at least, back to what passes for normal here. I’m at home, doing PT on an outpatient basis, and getting around the house with the walker and a PT technique I learned called “stand and pivot.” (Sounds like a square dance move to me. Perhaps I should curtsy to the walker. But I digress yet again.)

Square dancing isn’t in my immediate (or, most likely, long-term) future. Nor are ballet, polka, and can-can. (Waltz, perhaps. It was probably invented by someone who could do the stand and pivot. But I digress even more.)

Regular walking, though—that may not be beyond my power. At PT last week, I walked 97 feet, and yesterday I walked 250 steps. Both with the walker, of course.

Dan is urging me to try trickier forms of ambulation—climbing stairs and walking up and down a ramp that we installed for my wheelchair. My PT people insist that I need better balance and stamina first. And I don’t want to do anything that involves going boom. Chair-dancing—that I can handle.