Falling



And I'm trying to get back and I'm trying to catch up but I don't have any luck on these legs of lead

Fritz Beer, "Legs of Lead"



I fell today at the gym. It wasn't the most painful or the most embarassing, just the most recent. My dad was very upset. Staff from the gym, which is connected to a medical clinic, rushed out and put me in a wheelchair, called an ambulance and had me checked out. I declined to be taken to the hospital. I didn't get to work out. The fall was due to a fault in my walker. I wanted to lock the wheels but the left wheel lock was slack so the walker fell forward and so did I. I remember knocking the wind out of me, feeling a bruise on my head and a scratch on my neck.

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My legs are rather weak and I don't have much range of motion due to my spinal cord injury. I've probably fallen a hundered times since my stenosis started 3 years ago. Last summer, I was so afraid to walk that I didn't leave my house for months, living on delivery pizza and crawling from my bed to my couch.


The first time I fell was probably the worst. It was as if fate was informing me that now there was something new in my life and now is time to adapt. I was in the shower, and my feet slipped out from under me, and I broke the fall with my ribcage. I went to work, probably in a state of shock. When I finally went to the doctor the next day and got the x-ray report back, it turned out I had 7 broken ribs, and there was nothing they could do except perscribe vicodin. I took two days off and stayed high on that stuff, and it hurt every time I breathed for the next 6 weeks. I do remember having to sneeze once while I was at my desk and I howled in pain. I remember the people near my cube at Lotus say 'aww' when that happened. I actually liked working there at that time.
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I must have have fallen 3 or 4 times at the airport. I remember once I fell down in Austin airport when a man helped me get back on my feet that I said "I always seem to fall at the airport" he said "at the airport, huh?" very worriedly. People get very upset when they see a human train wreck lying on the floor. I notice them staring. When I fall in places where lots of people are around it always seems that time slows down to a crawl, and I become a black hole of attention for the room; everybody is sucked into looking at me. This is even more true since my legs became spastic; when I fall these days my legs start spasming and kicking violently for a few seconds until I get control of them. Anyway, I never walk in the airport anymore. I always check my bags and then take the wheelchair from the beginning to the end, sometimes even out to my car. Once when I was carrying my laptop and another bag at Boston's airport, I slipped from the weight and broke my right ring finger on the way down. It's no fun starting a day of travel with a broken finger, believe me..


I hate falling at the mall the worst. I haven't been in a mall for at least 6 months. I fell at the mall in Austin in a book store knocking over a bunch of books. I was in a pissy mood, and when some guy stood over me presumably to help I said "enjoying the show?" I still feel bad about that. The last mall fall was durring my friend Eric's wedding weekend. We were there trying on our tuxedos. On the way back to the car, my feet cliped themselves and I landed face down. Eric was suffering from his Tourettes at the time and yelled "Jesus" and his tic vocalizations suddenly got a lot worse. I felt guilty for increasing his Tourettes tics..


The worst falls are the ones when I'm in a state of agitated depression. I remember once when I was about to decide to move back with my parents at the end of my stay in Austin I fell at a Radio Shack. I went to the Radio Shack because my portable phone kept running out of batteries, so I went to get a regular phone. I was very agitated, because I had just gotten back from a job interview at Providian, a credit card company. My job was to be calling people who were on the verge of delinquency and collecting payments from them before their card froze up. Considering that I was in bankrupsy myself, I knew I would feel guilty every time I picked up the phone. I've worked in crappy phone center jobs before, at MCI for example. It's what I like to call a "dog" job. I call it that because most of the people that work there call each other "dog"; even the white ones. It was shortly after that interview that I decided that I'd rather live at home and not work then work at a dog job. Anyways, I was in Radio Shack. I bought the phone, then lost my balance and knocked over a big display of stuff in the store. My first instinct was to freeze, lay on the floor, and tell the poor Radio Shack man to call the police so they could take me to a mental health facility. I was totally paniced. It's hard to drive when your brain is telling you that you're under a threat and have to run to somewhere safe. By that evening I wasn't able to fill out an admittance form at the mental hospital because I couldn't remember my name..


There are 3 ways to react to a fall from an emotional standpoint. You can laugh at it, the way that the guys in the band I was in did when I fell, you can howl about it, or you can take the feelings and swallow them. Unfortunately when you fall in public, you usually end up taking the third option, and end up feeling depressed, sad and angry..


A lot of my falls could have been prevented if I had just been willing to buy and use the type of adaptive devices that were appropriate for my level of disability. For the longest time I didn't use a cane at all, long after I started to need one. When I needed two canes, I insisted on using just one. Somehow using one cane was cool, using two was not. My rate of falling diminished tremendously when I started to use two crutches or a walker.