HELP, I'VE FALLEN AND I CAN'T GET UP!

This coming friday will be the three week anniversary of the removal of my gall bladder (the real term ends in "ectomy").

I am becoming aware of the onset of old person's "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up"syndrome.

Last winter it was the slip on the icy steps routine that laid me up with a broken ankle for months.

Yesterday morning I was leaving my office for the car, lost my balance leaving the last step and wind milled about six feet before crashing to the ground on my right hip and the right side of my stomach, not only knocking the wind oout of myself, but sending a real thriller of pain through all the incisions in my lower abdomen.

I, in addition to being hurt, was dumbfounded to find myself on the ground. I don't slip and fall. Well, I never used to slip and fall. WTF??

So of course, I tried to get up too quickly and lost my balance and went down again. There are two inherent problems: 1. I have four incisions that are still trying to re-fuze, and I am on a blood thinner, the kind of rat poison know as Cumodin, and one of the warnings on the bottle is not to cut yourself or to fall down - falling down can cause one to bleed to death internally.

I finally got myself up, brushed myself off, and took inventory. I found that outside of some new pain to the half healed incisions, that I now found it difficult to breathe deeply without pain. The general feeling was one of having sprained my chest.

But I soldiered on for the rest of the active day, taking Walter down to visit Doug in Osseo, returning home and firing off two large pizzas for the angels of mercy at Luther Hospital who h ad been such great help to Doug. By the time we got back home from retrieving pans and got ready for bed, I was having difficulty moving about at all. But I chalked it off to "end od day" "things will be better in the morning" and got into bed way in advance of Kim.

I had struggled mightily to find a reclining position that didn't hurt. Then Kim came to bed,and woke me up in search of the TV remote control.

Not being able to find it without getting out of bed caused me to realize that NOW I was in real trouble physically. We turned out the lights and I tried to once again find the position. Instead, there was no position that now did not produce whelps of pain and finally fed up with it, Kim threw her robe on and told me we were going to the hospital.

The emergency staff wanted blood for tests, and my arteries were still in hiding from the surgery and hospital stay of weeks ago, so I have punctures in both forearms today.

After being there for over an hour they determined that nothing was broken, that I was not bleeding interiorly, and that my pain was all from the fall which had "disturbed" my healing incisions.

Armed with pain pills we returned home.

There were a lot of things I was going to accomplish today. Ain't gonna happen.

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