Two weekends ago I had a catastrophic fall and ended up in the nearest hospital’s emergency room at about 2:00 a.m.
The details:
As I wrote in a recent post, we put this grab bar on the wall above the bathtub for me to use when showering. I never used it with a lot of force; I used it only when shampooing my hair, because I close my eyes then and need to touch something solid just to keep me oriented as to where I am.
So as I had my eyes closed and my right hand was lathering up the top of my head, my left hand lightly held onto this bar.
Then the bar fell off of the wall. I fell backward, into the shower curtain, which couldn’t hold my weight, after which the shower curtain, plus the rod holding it in place, and I fell outside the tub. My head and right elbow hit the marble floor, and the whole thing made a loud noise, like an explosion. My husband was downstairs in the kitchen and ran up the stairs to see what was wrong. I needed help to stand up, after which we noticed that I was bleeding in two places: The top of my head and my right elbow.
My husband put bandages on the two places where there was blood, and I dried off and got into bed, sitting upright with my back to the wall. The time was about 7:00, our normal time for watching TV together before turning the lights off and going to sleep. I stayed in this upright position for a few hours, trying not to move my right arm too much, as I was experiencing a lot of pain. I was also worried that the wound on my head might damage the wires of my DBS setup.
At 2:00 a.m., as the pain in my elbow kept increasing, we went to the nearest hospital’s emergency room. The first person we talked to there said I might need stitches on my head, but then the staff took a C-scan of my head and an X-ray of my elbow, after which they told me I was fine and could go home.
Now, a week and a half later, my elbow is swollen and painful but my head feels fine. I’m still in a state of shock, however, and am trying to think clearly about what this means for me going forward. I’ll return to this post later to record my thoughts. Stand by.
