Taking a tumble

The other day I fell down the stairs at home… again.

Well, when I say “fell down the stairs”, it would be more precise to say that I fell over on the stairs and as I began my precipitous trip down them I grabbed hold of a banister rail, almost wrenching my right arm from its socket, and as I pulled up short my left leg got wedged and twisted in between two banister rails. But it broke my fall; the question was, had it broken anything else?

As indicated above, it’s not the first time and I rather fear it might not be the last. On other occasions I was not fast enough to check my flight (no pun intended) and I careered down to the bottom of the staircase finishing with a nasty bump on my behind and usually bashing an arm, leg or even my head (or all three!) against the end banister rails, with minimum consequences other than bruises (physical and mental… hehhe).

Funnily enough, to judge by my injuries sustained this time round and paradoxical as it may appear, it would seem better to allow myself to bump my way down to the bottom of the stairs on my posterior as a sledge than to try and check my fall and risk dislocating an arm or a leg or both, as on this occasion. But I had no time to think and it was a reflex action on my part.

The fall is usually occasioned by my foot coming down too near the edge of a step and sliding off it. The result is easy to imagine. Had I been wearing shoes or been barefoot, instead of just in my socks, it might not have happened, as in both these cases there is more grip than with socks, but it can still happen and to be honest I don’t now recall what I had on my feet (if anything) the other times I fell. I could be talking a load of baloney.

Having sustained the fall and managed to free my left leg from the banister rails, it was time to assess the damage, so to speak: very painful right arm, especially at the shoulder and under the armpit; generalised pain in the left leg, especially around the toes and foot in general. I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t dislocated my arm but when I finally got back to my feet and went downstairs to make myself some tea (the reason for my taking to the stairs in the first place), although painful the arm was usable, the pain was not extreme, and I could handle objects with ease (as long as they were not too heavy). As for the leg, it appeared to have come out of it very well and it hurt only slightly, as was to be expected.

In the days that have followed, my right arm has got better and better and it is clear that the pain was just due to the sudden jolt it received when I tugged on it to break my fall. What has proved less satisfactory however, much to my surprise, is my left leg. For the last few days it has been ‘snapping’ or ‘clicking’ at the knee-joint, a painful occurrence, which happens in particular when I attempt to turn on it to change direction or with some other small manoeuvres, though strange to say it has not much affected my jogging where I make no sudden turning movements and where I get into a regular rhythm.

The clicking of the knee-joint and the twinge of pain it causes has diminished a bit but as yet it has not ceased, and so I wait to see if it decreases to nil or continues to give me trouble, at which time I will betake myself to the quack for further assessment. But, compared to the day after the accident, when my dodgy leg and bruised arm made it extraordinarily difficult to lift myself out of the bathtub without engaging in a complicated body manoeuvre, things have improved greatly. So we shall see.

This latest fall of mine, especially as I get older and no slimmer (rather the opposite!), has brought home to me the fragility of life and the realisation of how much more serious such a fall could be and that I have gotten off lightly again. But I really must not make a habit of it. With the death of my schoolmate George in 2008, and various other deaths around me in more recent years, I have become ever more aware of the inescapable end for which we’re all headed in one way or another. As such, however, I'm less willing to hasten such an end through sheer carelessness on my part. Anyway, I won’t pursue this - I’m getting too morbid and going off subject.

Some of the worst accidents happen in the home (I include one’s garden under this term), as we’re often told, and I can vouch for that. I’ve slipped in the kitchen and landed on my backside on the floor, I’ve fallen out of bed, capsized in a swivel-chair, and been tipped onto the floor as my bean-bag (yes, I’m rather partial to beanbags) collapsed in an amorphous heap. All of these were minor mishaps, little or no injury, and I survive to tell the tale. When my children were small and I younger (much younger), we used to have friendly fights and, believe me, they were probably much more dangerous than most mishaps I’ve had in recent years! The boys always thought I was pretending as I lay on the floor red in face, weak in limb, panting, unmoving, struggling to get my breath back, only to have them jump on me again and resume the tussle.

The garden too, where I often labour, is a source of dangers waiting to happen. There I have been more fortunate than in the house, probably for no other reason than that I spend much less time in the garden. That is not to say that I’ve not lost my balance on occasion and fallen in a flower-bed or, worse still, in the small conifers adorning the rock-garden, but these are rare. No, falling down the stairs, or partially down them, is my speciality and, if I’m not careful, will be my downfall in the literal sense! And of course, as we all know, the heavier you are (not bigger in my case), the harder you fall.

When I think of a fall down the stairs, inevitably a scary scene from the film Psycho comes to mind, where the hired detective is pushed down the stairs at the end of the movie and goes reeling back and back, arms flailing in the air, scary music playing, as we follow him in his backward fall to the bottom of the stairs where his fate is sealed in the worst possible way. My staircase is not so long nor is there scary music playing when I take my tumble and nor, so far at least, has any of my falls been fatal (otherwise how would I be writing this?!). But it does make me think and resolve to take more care as I move about the house, the garden, or wherever. Just the other day I heard of a builder, working without a safety harness, who fell just two and a half metres from scaffolding onto a hard floor and died on the spot. How? He landed on his head!