Saturday, April 26, 2014

A good combination

I was hoping to  tell you about the wonderful little birds rejoicing in the back garden. I learned yesterday that they are "house finches." Very sweet, and very sociable. They seem to like to just talk. A lot. Which is very sweet... as are they.

To give everyone a break from My Travels With Elimination. Which are ... no fun. For anyone.

Instead, we're gonna talk about ... falling.

Yesterday, I was trying to transfer from my wheelchair to the bed, I might have been occupied with something that I thought was going to cause no problem except it did, and my legs just gave way and I just went down.

Now, here's the thing: How your [everything] malfunctions depends on YOU. Because, at the core, it's your nervous system that's whack, and what does or doesn't work is very ... personal. So there's no real point to looking at why something went south taking you with it. If you see some sort of system of "I do X and then I fall in Y manner," you just don't do X and you're fine.

But the most important part about falling is that you hit the ground on your terms. The bottom line is that the force of the impact needs to go somewhere other than you, and if it does, it does so over a larger area and thus risking less injury.

I spent years in college practicing aikido rolls and falls. I freaked out a physical therapist in the hospital because I didn't stop myself by catching myself on my wrists (which too often ends in breakage) but instead by slapping the "mat" (or whatever it was) and rolling a little bit. "No," I told them, "I'm falling right." But aikido and judo are not so good in the "your support just disappeared and you're going straight down. Or maybe not so straight..." department, which is what happened last night.

So I'm going down, and I'm thinking, "Now how am I gonna do the least damage?" Remembering the Mythbusters doing major falls into soft objects (we let the soft object diffuse the force of the fall, so it doesn't go into us), I know there's piles of stuff and whatnot, and if I don't fall into those, I'm gonna smack my head on something or other and that's not good, and I'm going down into kind of a corner so I've got no room for aikido tricks (we don't practice being thrown into a corner, which often means "being thrown into a wall"), I've got to let the whatever's there take the force and hope for the best.

Well, one of the things I fell into was an aluminum trash can. And, fortunately enough, it crumpled, and that's what ate the force. Yeah, I did get bunged up kinda bad by the rim of the can, I cracked a rib earlier while I was still "walking" by pulling the television over on to me, and this doesn't feel like a cracked rib, but dang, it hurts.

So, I got hurt, but far less than I might have been... which means, I guess, that martial arts, Mythebusters, and blind luck.

Apparently, a good combination.

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