After the Fall

The impact of tripping on a dark pavement was not just physical

I have written before about falls amongst elderly people, their huge cost to the NHS, and some technology that might help tackle the problem.  But I never expected to become one of the statistics - after all I am not an elderly person, am I?

Bruised and battered

Here’s what happened. On Friday evening, at around 6.40pm I hopped on a crowded Elizabeth line train, taking it just one stop to Hanwell. I was on my way to my son’s house to babysit while he and his wife went out to dinner. 

As I emerged from the station it had begun to rain heavily and as I had no raincoat or umbrella I considered waiting to see if it eased. Then I decided that, as my destination was only five minutes away, I might as well get on with it - a bit of rain never hurt anyone. I set off down the poorly lit street  and within seconds my face  was crashing into the pavement. It turned out that I had been tripped by a small branch that had been blown down that stormy evening. 

I tried to stumble to my feet, blood pouring from my face, convinced I had broken my nose. I felt my Apple Watch throbbing - it had registered my fall and was trying to call the emergency services. I wondered distractedly how to stop that - surely things were not that bad? But as kindly passers-by gathered round me, offering tissues to stem the flow of blood, their worried faces told me I must look pretty awful. I phoned my wife Diane who was at home and she rushed out to the car to come and find me.

While we waited for her to arrive, the police called me, alerted by my watch and I told them I was okay. Another passer-by, a nurse, told me I really needed to get to A&E to get a head wound stitched up. The thought of Friday evening in Ealing Hospital’s casualty department was not an enticing prospect but when Diane arrived she immediately saw that this would have to be our destination. 

Once we - or rather Diane - had negotiated the horrors of the hospital parking payment system we found that the queue in the A&E department at 7.30pm was relatively short. (By 10pm the place was heaving.) I sat there feeling shell shocked, beginning to realise that along with injuries to my face and my teeth - my tongue kept probing a jagged gap at the front of my jaw - my right arm was hurting quite a lot.

It was what happened when we saw the triage nurse, which accelerated my progress through the emergency department. As Diane was helping me out of my anorak, blood started to pour from the sleeve, leaving puddles on the floor. That was the first sign of how serious the problem with my elbow was.

I then spent many hours lying on a trolley, waiting for the next stage – which included two trips to the x-ray department.where I yelped with pain as they tried to manoeuvre me in position to get the best shot.

Around 11pm it looked as though I might be staying the night and having an operation in the morning so I sent Diane home. But by midnight they had decided that I would be going home after all, and the surgery would happen in the following week. There was still a lot of toing and froing, with a plaster cast fitted and repeated and increasingly  impatient requests from me for information and then painkillers. I finally arrived home in an ambulance at 3:45 am.

0240am - waiting to go home

It is now Monday, and I have spent the weekend being looked after by Diane. She has dressed me, washed me, cut up my food and generally waited on me hand and foot. It has been a sobering experience, a reminder of how vulnerable one can feel when ill and perhaps a glimpse of my future as Parkinson’s gradually makes me less capable of doing things I once took for granted.

I have also been wondering whether my Parkinson’s had anything to do with my fall. After all, amongst my Parky friends, falling over is one of the most common and feared symptoms of the condition. I am not convinced that someone in the best of health would have spotted that branch across the path. But I do know that I have a tendency to drag my right foot which has resulted in several stumbles over recent years, and from now on there will be an edge of fear associated with another activity which I never used to think about - going for a walk.

There are practical challenges posed by my injuries - I am typing this with one finger of my left hand, occasionally resorting to the use of the computer’s voice recognition software, until I get impatient with the gibberish it tends to produce. But I have also discovered that its emotional impact is in some ways greater than the physical pain it has caused. Until Friday evening I saw myself as a busy, motivated writer, podcaster and technology advisor coping well with my Parkinson’s - and definitely not an old person. But now I feel ten years older, shaky, indecisive, a patient waiting to be told what to do rather than a free agent shaping my life.

When I wrote a piece about a gadget called Bide which plays a recorded message from a relative telling an old person to be careful when they get out of bed to go to the loo, I could not imagine it being helpful to me. But in the small hours of this morning as I gingerly made my way down a few stairs to the bathroom I realised that a message from my son saying ‘“turn the landing light on Dad” would have been just the ticket.

The only other serious fall in my life came 25 years ago when I was skiing faster than my skills permitted on a black slope in the French Alps. I was helicoptered off the mountain with a broken arm and taken to hospital. Then too, I was badly shaken up emotionally as well as physically, realising that I might have lost my life up there. That feeling soon faded and I carried on skiing for many years without any more major accidents.

Now, as I wait to hear when I am returning to Ealing Hospital for an operation on my elbow, I hope that something else can be fixed - my shattered self-confidence. Because there are plenty more projects I want to get working on, from new books to more Movers and Shakers podcasts, and they will require energy and commitment.

Please forgive me if there is a brief hiatus in posts while I sort myself out.