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Hello, all. I'm new to this community but not to blogging. Thought I'd pass on one of those little tales about how life presents you with one of those perfect opportunities to choose whether to feel beleaguered or to put a more optimistic spin on things.
You may have noticed that it's winter. Here in Rhode Island, there is slush on top of snow on top of ice. Lovely. I drive around & see patients for a living, so I have no choice but to deal with it. So I wear boots with lots of traction, and try to park where I can trudge over snow if I have to rather than crawl over ice. The other day, I was parked in the relatively cleared-out lot of a senior/handicapped housing complex. I'd seen one of my patients there & had gone out to the car before seeing the other. While in the lot, an elderly former patient asked me to walk her across the slush to her car so she wouldn't fall & hurt herself. I was happy to assist. Then I went back in & saw my second patient.
Afterwards, I walked out to my car, unlocked it & opened the door to get ready to fling my work bag on the seat. I picked up one foot to swing it into the car, and the next thing I knew, my feet had flown up the air & I had landed hard & flat on the ground, full out on my back. Black ice. Infamous in Rhode Island. They call it black because you don't even notice it's there. It's like a sheet of dull cling wrap on the ground. I hit my lower back & pelvis so hard, I figured either the force of the fall would be distributed evenly throughout my hips & pelvis & I'd be all right, or -- I wouldn't be fine at all. I'm middle aged & osteopenic, so I figured it was a crap shoot.
At first all I could do was howl in pain & shock. I landed so hard on my lower back that I literally knocked the piss right out of me & immediately voided my very full bladder. So, now I was wet & in pain & shock. Naturally, there was no one in the parking lot to help me, which may have been a good thing because the chances would have been that anyone there would be over 75 years old & in no position to help me off the ground. Once I was able to stop howling, however, I managed to haul my butt up, slowly, and drive home & change. Everything seemed to work, if somewhat reluctantly. I then limped to the office to fill out an accident report, then drove to the local emergency room & get X-rayed. Four hours later, the bottom line was that nothing broke. Two days later, however, I predictably feel like I was run over by a truck.
Well, falling has been epidemic these days. I'm hardly the only person in my community to have fallen lately. When my patients fall, they always break things & end up in nursing homes. I only ended up wasting 4 hours in the ER. The bad news is that I have a headache, a stiff neck & I can't walk up a flight of stairs. The good news is that despite being osteopenic, I didn't break anything. I didn't exactly bounce, but I'm not even black & blue anywhere, and it's going to be 50 degrees on Sunday so maybe some of this bloody ice will finally melt. I have a perfect excuse to do nothing for a few days, so I can lay around & order take-out & read novels & not feel the least bit guilty. And if I want to milk it, I have a ready supply of sympathetic friends who would be happy to take the dog for a walk or bring over a pizza. On the whole, I've decided the see the glass as half-full on this one. I'm in one piece & I lived to complain, as one of my patients always says. Life is good.
