Gravity is Ruthless. Fall-Proof Yourself or Face the Consequences.
My Dad went from independent to crippled with one failed step. It doesn't have to be that way.
My father went from independent adult to crippled victim in one failed step.
Saturday afternoon, I was helping my dad in his greenhouse. He grew his own pepper plants from seeds he had harvested last fall. Dad doesn’t eat much of what he grows. He just loves gardening.
Afterward, we sat outside and had a chat about life, what’s going on with him and Mom, and (!) politics. Then he wandered back to his house. It was a good afternoon.
He may never walk to that greenhouse again.
Late that night, we got a weird text from my Mom. All it said was “Hi. Dad”. We knew right away something bad had happened.
We rushed to their house to find my dad moaning in agony on the floor, wearing only his underwear. He had fallen on his left hip, hard, and was in a lot of pain. We couldn’t move him at all without making it worse, so we called an ambulance.
X-rays confirmed what we were all afraid of. He had an Intertrochanteric hip fracture, a few inches from the hip joint. He would need surgery so they could put screws or other hardware in to hold the bones together. Quite the ordeal for his poor body.
Recovery rates are low. Mortality rates are high. Chances of him being alive next year at this time? Hard to think about. It might as well be a death sentence.
“Wow, that’s rough. But he’s old, and these things happen. There’s nothing we can do to prevent this kind of thing!”
Not True.
It is true that aging is unavoidable. But, how we age? We have SO MUCH effect on that.
My parents did a few things to sabotage themselves:
Dad smoked and drank hard alcohol for decades
My parents eat a lot of hot dogs, fries, boxed mac n’cheese, and bread.
A few weeks ago, I asked my dad the last time he ate a vegetable besides the few tomatoes he grew. He laughed at me and said, “I had some salad in 2005. Does that count?”
Their only exercise is walking to the bathroom or microwave, and looking for the remote.
So what do you think? Could he have done more to fall-proof himself?
Older people fall down, get hurt, and suffer.
You might have people close to you who have broken a hip, smashed their head on the ground, or broken a wrist when they fell.
So.
What are you doing to fall-proof yourself? How are you strengthening your body and making friends with the ground?
If the answer is that you are doing nothing, why? Do you enjoy hospital visits, excruciating pain, and have a bit of a death wish? Are you planning to fail yourself and your loved ones?
Do you want to cut your life short and end it with a hospital bed, with a catheter and a bedpan, while your children stand around in the hospital room remembering how you used to be able to walk?
Think about it.
Fall-proofing yourself isn’t just about health. It’s about freedom. You want to walk into your later years like a confident bad-ass action hero, not stumble in like a nervous loser of a clown.
If you’re interested in what you can do to stop from becoming a statistic like my dad, I have some ideas about how you could fall-proof yourself below.
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