Help! I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up

In the back of our minds, I suppose all of us 60+ ladies with our thinning bones have at least one time thought about what it might be like if we fell and couldn't get back up. It's our worst fear; at least it was one of my biggest fears. What if I were all alone, broke my hip, and couldn't crawl to the phone to call 911?

Well, a week ago, my day had come.  I had mopped the bathroom floor earlier in the morning and left the weight watchers' scale in the hallway while the floor dried.  I went about my business, doing other tasks, and forgot all about that darned scale in the hall.  Until--my foot got stuck underneath the lip of the scale and I lost my balance. 

My arms flailed about, trying to keep my balance when Bam!  I first landed on my arm, and then with a thud, crashed down on my left hip.

The pain was absolutely searing! I'd never felt anything like it. I couldn't move, let alone crawl to the phone to call for help. I lay there helpless until my husband came home. Horrified by the way I looked, he tried to help me sit up. After about an hour, I finally was able to sit against the wall. Another hour passed before I could prop myself up on the bed, after piling the cushions from the sofa in a heap and inching myself further up.

I feared that I had broken my hip and fell apart crying, knowing that I'd have to go to the hospital. 

So began my journey back to health. Follow me in this blog as I document my sometimes funny, sometimes depressing, ways I've chosen to cope with this worst-case scenario.

My Trip to the Emergency Room

After my terrible fall, my husband called 911, telling the operator that I needed to be transported to the hospital since I couldn't get into our car.  He told the operator, "They don't need to turn the siren on or anything like that." A few minutes later, we heard a siren approaching, and looking out the window, saw a firetruck and am an ambulance, along with 4 firemen and 2 paramedics from the ambulance.  Well, I guess all our neighbors are in for a show, I thought.

I had four firemen in my front room helping me lie down. Sounds a bit like the beginning of a sexy erotic romance, doesn't it?  Not so. They put me on a stretcher and loaded me into an ambulance taking me to St. Joseph's Hospital's Emergency Room.  All the while I was praying that I didn't have a broken hip.

Once inside the hospital, the nurses took me to get an X-ray and tried to transfer me from the hospital bed to a table where they could x-ray me. When they lined up my bed to the x-ray table, they said, "Scoot over." It was impossible: I couldn't. It was too painful and my hips weren't working. It felt like my pelvis was paralyzed. Eventually, they got a blanket underneath me and pulled it slowly, moving me over to the table.  They told me to bend my feet so that my big toes met.  I complied, but it was very painful.

They took me back to my room, and I waited for the results.  A young doctor who looked like the main character in a 60s show Doctor Kildare came in looking chipper.  He told me, "Well...I've good some good news and some bad news.  The good news is that you don't have a broken hip.  The bad news is that you fractured your pelvis in two places."

He also told me that there was nothing they could do about it and the best course of action was pain management and physical therapy.  They ordered a walker for me and I waited for about a half-hour.  A nurse came in and gave me a shot of a pain killer. I was so glad that I didn't have to stay overnight in the hospital.  I had visions of having to be there for days and then being transferred to a rehabilitation hospital--a very bleak outlook indeed.

Coming Home from the Hospital--Now What?

After I was released from the emergency room, I was elated because I didn't want to spend the night at the hospital.  I couldn't wait to get back home and sit in our backyard to watch our bluebird family eat out of their special feeding box.  When my husband helped get me out of the car, I faced my biggest hurdle: I couldn't climb the porch steps without excruciating pain: I had just fractured my pelvis 5 hours before, after all. We tried several different ways to get me up on the porch. I refused to let my husband carry me; we are both 65 and he has a bad back. We weren't exactly the 20-year-old bride and groom we once were.  It was all going to come down to me sucking up the pain and trying to use my good leg to climb up the steps.

It took about a half an hour for me to finally make it up to the porch. Then, I needed to figure out a way to climb over the threshold of the front door using the walker.  It sounds like such an easy task, doesn't it?  We cross the threshold all the time, without even thinking about it.

Lesson learned:

We needed to rent a wheelchair ramp and wheelchair as soon as possible. Otherwise, I was going to be a prisoner in my own house.

My next obstacle that first night was how to sit on the toilet without pain when nature called. When you have a fractured pelvis, it's very difficult to sit down and then stand up from the toilet. We found it best to use the walker to get to the toilet, and then grab the handles and sit slowly down.  It hurt--really badly.

Lesson learned:

We needed to get a portable raised toilet seat so the seat was at a level where it was closer to the handles of the walker.  We tried two toilet seats.  

This one from Wallgreens: I found it to be too wobbly.  

So we ordered another chair:

I liked this one much better because of the raised handles; I didn't feel as if I was falling down into an abyss when I tried to sit down, as I had before.

One thing I must warn you about though with both chairs: you cannot wipe yourself off with toilet paper when you're sitting down, as you usually do. Because of the handle design, you can't spread your legs after you go number 1 or number 2.  You have to do this standing up. It's very awkward and you feel like you're not getting yourself clean enough.  I found that when I needed to go number 2, I had to take off the raised chair and sit on the toilet seat the old-fashioned way.

If you fracture your hip or pelvis like I did, you find yourself ordering a lot of home medical supplies. You must suck it up and buy them; otherwise, you'll have to be in a rehabilitation hospital using all of their stuff--and who wants to do that?

When You Fracture Your Pelvis, Your Modesty Goes Out the Window

My husband and I have been happily married for 45 years, and after I fractured my pelvis, I realized that he would be seeing me totally naked in the light of day since there was so much I couldn't do for myself when I got home from the hospital.  Some couples are comfortable with being naked with each other in the day time, but I'm not.  I've gained about 20 pounds in the last two years and have been trying to hide it from my husband. He hasn't said anything about it because he's a nice guy.  And has learned, sometimes the hard way, what to say and what not to say after all this time of being together.

But still--I've definitely got some negative body issues. 

To get through this rehabilitation, your modesty has to go out the window.  You will find that your husband or caregiver is going to have to help you get in and out of the shower, pull up your panties after you get up from the toilet, and help you dress. It's humiliating and depressing, but you have to tell yourself that it's temporary.  My doctor told me that it takes 4-6 weeks before the pain goes away, and up to 3 months to be totally healed. 

You have to be patient and so does your caregiver.

For us, getting me in and out of the shower is not an easy thing to do.  Our house is over a hundred years old and the shower is so small that only one person can be inside.  I found that the best way to get inside without slipping, we had to first put a towel on the shower floor.  Next, we had to get the walker inside. After that I have to step up to the threshold and lean on the walker to raise up my good leg, then I have to get the bad leg over and balance myself in the shower so I don't slip.  

After that, the towel on the shower floor is soaking wet; but we'll handle that later. For now, I have to learn to get out of the shower without falling.

It's not easy. But it's temporary, right?  Let that be your mantra. 

Physical Therapy and Exercises for a Fractured Pelvis

I'm lucky to have good health insurance so I was able to get out-patient physical therapy after I fractured my pelvis. There is a great place to go near my house where I went before after I fractured my knee in 2008; so I trusted them, which is a big part of recovery from any traumatic injury. I needed to have confidence that my physical therapist wasn't going to hurt my injury and make it worse.

 A lot of physical therapy is manual resistance training where the therapist forces you to press against his or her hand as they move your injured leg around in ways you would have never imagined it was capable of. One of the first scary things he did was to pull my knees apart and then force me to try to put them back together, pushing against his grip. My leg had atrophied since my injury and this move was a lot harder than you'd think. Another challenging action my physical therapist did was to lift my injured leg all the way up upon his shoulder and then ask me to press my ankle against his body.  At first, I thought, you have got to be kidding.  I didn't think I could do it, but I did.  One of the first "accomplishments" I could do today was to stand up and sit down without relying on a walker.  This was a big deal for me.  He tried to help me walk across the room and take a few steps without a walker, but I wasn't able to accomplish it yet.  After only a few steps, I told him, "I can't do it."  I have so many things to learn.  The biggest ingredient in a successful physical therapy session is to lose the fear of falling and the horrible memory of how much it hurt when I fell. I will walk again!

Here are some exercises my physical therapist had me do for my fractured pelvis:

If the print on the samples below is too small for you to read, please go to my-exercise-code.com and use code QG48BHC when prompted. The website even has videos you can watch to learn how to do these exercises correctly.

Wheelchair Ramp Safety

Log Ride at Knotts Berry Farm

I really pushed myself today.  I was able to walk to the corner and back with the walker.  It took me about 20 minutes to accomplish this because I was being extra careful looking down at the sidewalk, making sure there weren't any uneven surfaces to stumble over.

I haven't been happy with the wheelchair ramp we rented.  I always felt like it was going to tip over.  It was too steep of a ride. Climbing it reminded me of the ascent of the Matterhorn ride at Disneyland, and going down it felt like the descent on the log ride at Knotts Berry Farm, but much less safe.  It wasn't the proper length that the ADA recommends--which is one foot for every inch of rise. In our case, that would equal 12 feet. We were shocked by how expensive it costs--over $500!  The only ramp we could find to rent was 6 feet. No wonder I didn't feel safe on it!

Without the ramp, I vowed to force myself to climb down the porch steps without it.  This was a challenge because it was one of the biggest hurdles I had to overcome when I came home from the hospital after fracturing my pelvis.  We live in a 103-year-old craftsman bungalow and one of the historical features of this school of architecture is elephantine columns on each side of the porch. So, while stepping cautiously down the first porch step, I clung onto the ledge of the column for dear life. Using my good foot I descended, then brought down my injured leg.  Yay!  I made it down one step with a fractured pelvis!!  I had one more step to go, and here's where it got tricky.  The surface of our driveway is old and uneven with deep cracks as hazards.  I was able to position the walker on a relatively flat surface and lean against the walker to steady myself as I took the final step.  I was shaky but made it without falling, so Hooray!!

Enough excitement for one day.

Update: After three days of trying this new method of stair climbing, I still was having a hard time going up and down the porch steps.  So, we hired a handyman who built a rail for the porch steps and it's working out much better.

Taking a Shower After Breaking My Pelvis

Here's our small shower with my walker in it

Today is the 3 week anniversary of the day I fell and fractured my pelvis.  On the positive side, I can now dress myself, walk 20 minutes a day with a walker, stand up and sit down without using a walker, climb a few stairs with the help of a new handrail we had installed on our front porch, and get in and out of our car by hoisting myself up to a handle that is on the inside arch of my Mazda's ceiling.

The pain from my fall is less sharp but still achy. I read that with a pelvis fracture it can take up to six weeks before the pain goes away. I take two 600 milligrams of Ibuprofen a day, one before bedtime and the other after I eat my breakfast. I use either a heating pad or ice pad for 15 minutes a day, which provides some relief. I have a very good physical therapist whom I see twice a week who's trying to reteach me how to walk without depending on the walker.

My biggest challenge is getting in and out of our shower.  Our house is over a hundred years old and originally had no shower; just a bathtub, toilet, and sink. The shower is only 3 feet deep and 2.4 wide, and I currently have to fit my walker and myself into it. 

Oh, how I wish my husband and I had one of those luxurious walk-in showers like you see on home and garden shows that have room enough for 2 people.  It would be so wonderful to join my husband in the shower and have him there in case I drop the soap. There would be plenty of room for the two of us and my walker. 

My Dream Shower For Two

Yes, we do have a bathtub. It's also original to the house and is one of the deepest bathtubs I've ever seen. When I was younger, I used to love luxuriating in it, pouring fragrant bath seeds while the tab flowed, and lighting candles to create just the right mood for relaxation. "Calgon, take me away," as the old commercial used to say.  Now that I'm 64 and have arthritis in my left knee, I need to flip myself over on all fours--doggie style--and inch my body up using my good leg. This is dangerous because the surface of the tub is so slippery that I have to put a dry towel under my body to have some traction after all the water drains out. Now that I've fractured my pelvis, this technique would be out of the question. I'm afraid my days in the bathtub are now a thing of the past.  As the Rolling Stones' lyrics say, "What a drag it is getting old!"