They say in the moment before you die your life flashes before your eyes, things are slow motion, and you get to review things like it’s a movie of your life. This, I think, is a crock of bull or doesn’t apply to me. No, I’m not writing to you from the great beyond, I just fell (with a capital Fell) and could have (should have?) died. Or even, more likely, crippled for life.
I’m not a professional writer. I like to make things. Mostly software, but also woodworking projects and fixing and designing things. I also like to garden. We have a 2+ acre property overlooking the Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest. When we bought it, it was a wild, undeveloped piece of land with a great view. We had grand plans, which are a bit scaled back now. But we did build a small studio, with a small loft on the second floor, and we have lots of land to Plant Things. Or rather, we are still in the process of building it. I could go on and on about the process of building this, but that’s probably a different newsletter.
For some strange reason, our county building department would not approve a stairway for the access to the loft but it was fine with them if we used a ladder for access. I will not go on and on about how idiotic this is, but that’s how it is. The loft was poured (the building is concrete) and accessible in 2013. So for the past 5 or 6 years, we have been accessing the loft via that ladder. The Ladder. We will talk a bit about The Ladder and what an epically stupid thing I did. That almost killed me.
Maybe I will talk about ladder safety later, but for now I will just tell you what I did that was So Stupid. Our wonderful flooring contractor had just put in a quartersawn red oak hardwood floor. He had to “float” this floor, gymnasium style, in order to avoid shooting nails to secure the floor (this is how it is normally done). We wanted Real Wood, not laminate and this is the only way to build this real hardwood floor because we have radiant heat in the concrete subfloor (tubes with hot water running through them are permanently poured into the concrete subfloor). If you shoot a nail into one of these tubes, it normally doesn’t leak. Until the nail rusts six months later. And then you have a disaster. Anyway, back to the ladder. We have a brand new hardwood floor which my wife and I are seeing for the very first time. It’s so beautiful. And so new and shiny. Our ladder to the loft was put away so I went to go set it up so we could go see the floor in the loft. I put yellow towels under the feet, the kind Costco sells to shine your car, but people use to clean Just About Everything. So I wouldn’t mar the floor.
OK, almost all of you know now what is going to happen. We went up and down this ladder a few times. At the end of the day I went up to the loft for I don’t remember what reason (I’m sure it was a good one!) and took a video of a redtail hawk “kiting” on the updraft from the bluff we face. Then I stepped onto the ladder to start back down and go back to our weekday home. It immediately slid out from underneath me, sliding on the yellow towels and there I was, with my feet 9 feet off the ground (and every other part of my body higher than that), headed for a Very Bad Fall.
My life did not flash in front of my eyes. I was immediately slammed to the ground in the most blinding and excruciating pain I have ever experienced. I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t black out but my visual field was very black. My lower back and hip and arms and probably a whole bunch of other things Just Hurt Really Awful. My wife was outside and heard the ladder (and me) hit the floor. It took her a second to realize what had happened and she came running. The fall knocked the wind out of me totally and I couldn’t breathe. I was wondering if my heart had stopped. The tunnel vision was intense. I’m trying to assess how badly I am hurt, did I break my spine, am I crippled for life? Since I can’t breathe, I can’t answer my wife’s anguished cries for how badly am I hurt. She can immediately see what happened but she has no idea how bad it is because I Can’t Talk. I’m rolling around a little bit because it Hurts So Bad. I soon discover I can wiggle my toes and my arms and legs seem to work, to the extent that I can move them, in my curled up, seized up, tunnel of pain state of being.
When I ask my wife “what is the first thing I said?”, she mimics the moaning and groaning coming out of me and describing me moving back and forth on the floor. We eventually start having a conversation about whether to call 911 or get in the car. Later I learn about sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. I’m in full “flight or fight” mode. Let me tell you about my experience with the sympathetic nervous system. It does not relieve you from pain. It still hurts like hell. But it gives you the ability to do things that you would not normally be able to do. This is the state where normal people lift heavy things to save their loved one or themself. I roll onto my hands and knees and try to get up. I can’t.
Let me take a time out here. Every one of you is thinking now, "why are you moving?” and “why aren’t you calling 911?” These are both good questions. At this point, the probability of a spinal break is very high. If it’s really bad, you are paralyzed. If it’s still really bad, and you can move, it doesn’t mean your spinal column is “stable”. So you shouldn’t move and you should call 911. I didn’t do that. I figured if I could move everything, I was just severely bruised. And I didn’t want to go to ER where we were at, I wanted to go to a trauma center in Seattle. This was definitely a risky and stupid thing to do in retrospect. Spoiler, it turns out well in the end (I guess you can figure that out since I’m publishing a newsletter!), but it’s still Not The Thing To Do.
I go through a cycle of getting up on my hands and knees and collapsing back into a rolling, moaning ball of pain on the floor. In addition to my hip and my lower back hurting something fierce, both of my arms are bruised and incredibly sore. I realize that I must have tried to break my fall Judo style. When you first take judo lessons they teach you how to fall. You fall onto the mat and you break your fall with your arms. You do this over and over, every practice session. They teach you how to fall because you are going to fall (or rather, you’re going to get thrown, which is like a fall, but with force added to it). There’s also an exercise where you run, tumble over your hands, and break your fall with your arms, and keep going so you end up standing at the end. I’m not a judo master, I just took several years of lessons when I was a kid. I have no idea if this helped me, but I think I definitely tried to break my fall based on those years of training. The evidence is all over my arms (cuts, bruise, scrapes), in the exact places you would break your fall in Judo.
My wife is hurriedly getting the car ready because we decided to try to get to the hospital ourselves. Our place is in a remote area but we have a fire station not far from our house. No idea if they have paramedic service there or not. My wife thought it would take forever to get an ambulance. I still wasn’t sure if I could walk to the car or not and my wife is not strong enough to carry me. I figured if I could walk to the car we would drive ourselves, if we could not, we would dial 911. (We should have just dialed 911).
I don’t know how I did this. Actually, I do, it’s called adrenaline. Through all of the pain, I stand up, and I walk outside and get in the car, basically unaided. In one of the next posts, you will see how seemingly impossible this is but the sympathetic nervous system pumping adrenaline can do some amazing things.
It’s 3:30 P.M. on Saturday March 16. To get to Seattle you have to “drive around” (through Tacoma) which takes over two hours or you take a ferry. The next ferry is at 4:00. It takes about 23 minutes to get from our place to the ferry dock booth. It’s one of the nicest days of the year so there’s likely to be a line.
In the next post, I will tell the story of getting to the ER.