2006-01-30 - 5:39 p.m.
Now that I use a wheelchair most of the time, I don�t fall down nearly as much as I used to. But when I did, I learned to take a fall without hurting myself quite well. I feel like I should pass on my knowledge to you, in case you ever find yourself falling down splat.
The secret trick to falling is actually quite simple. Just fall. Embrace it. Don�t fight it. Keep in mind that once you hit the floor, you�re probably not going any further. Do your best to control your trip to the ground, but don�t scramble and panic trying to keep yourself upright. Most of the ways people get hurt in falls is trying to keep themselves from falling.
There are a host of guidelines I could offer. Landing on your butt is obviously preferable to landing face-first. Landing on your whole side spreads the impact out a lot more than landing on only an elbow. But these are all things applicable to specific situations. It�s ridiculous to keep some list of rules in your head. You�re not going to have time to scroll through them as you�re falling.
Just use some common sense. Again, the main idea is to get yourself to the ground; you�ll stop after that. You need to be able to let go of some pride here. Sure, lying sprawled out on the ground after spreading the impact of a fall may be an embarrassing position. But it�s a whole lot better than splitting your head open.
The most spectacularly disastrous spills I�ve taken have been at times of �transition�. Times when I was progressing to a new physical state and hadn�t yet realized that I wasn�t capable anymore of doing something. Basically, times when I unintentionally reached too far. Most of these instances are now kind of funny in retrospect, but were pretty painful at the time.
In the summer of 2001, I was still pretty newly-diagnosed and not aware that I had any physical limitations at all yet. Alithea was working in Germany for the summer (I confess that I never understood her German obsession; with her black and me Jewish, the Nazis would have exterminated us both), in a small town called Fulda (OK fine, they�re not Nazis now, but it�s still a weird culture for her to get into). I visited for a week or so.
There wasn�t much going on in Fulda, but it is very centrally located. A lot of other cities are a few hours train ride from it. I got a Deutschebahn rail pass and took a lot of day trips myself while she was at work. One day I went to the city of Heidelberg. Heidelberg has a whole bunch of universities in it (and the German university system with free tuition and few formal degrees is very strange from an American perspective, but that�s a rant for another time) and considers itself a very intellectual place.
One of the big attractions in Heidelberg is der Philosophenweg, the �philosophers� walk�. This is a pretty pathway surrounded by exotic shrubs that meanders up a hill. Following it in the footsteps of thinkers and teachers and poets of times past, you�re supposed to be spiritually inspired and invigorated. Or something. Not being able to read the German informational brochures at the time, I was a little hazy on the particulars.
So like a good tourist, I followed the same path as Goethe (or whoever). There were indeed some very nice views along the way. But when I got to the top I realized that unless I hurried back down, I�d miss the train back that I wanted to catch. I�d better run. In fact, I�d better go mostly off the main path entirely and cut straight across the wooded areas it backswitched around.
Now, it�s hard to say whether I had lost the ability to run well at this point or if running straight down a wooded hill was just a stupid idea in the first place. I know that that April I was jogging by the river in Montreal with no problem, while by early September I found myself unable to play in a soccer game at a friend�s wedding. So maybe I was having an unrecognized physical problem. But maybe I was just being dumb.
I started running off the side of the path over root- and leaf-covered ground to the next section of clear road that had wound back across and intersected my route. Boy, this is certainly much quicker than just going along the much longer twisty trail that wrapped back and forth to make a more gradual incline. So what that low-hanging branches were whipping into my face when I passed a tree? I could handle their minor stings and abrasions.
It�s unclear whether I was propelling myself or just letting gravity pull me forward since I was heading downhill. But unsurprisingly, halfway down I skidded out on some leaves or tripped on a root or who knows. I wiped out completely, dramatically, painfully. The agony of defeat. I sprawled forward spread-eagle and landed on my face, knocking the wind out of me.
After a minute I rolled over and sat up in a daze. My clothes were covered in dirt. Little rocks and twigs were mashed into my skin. I was a bloody mess. I seemed to have hit my chin pretty hard and torn open a big gash. I got up slowly and made my way down to the path. Maybe I should stick to this the rest of the way down. I looked at the time. Aw man, I was going to miss my train.
I slowly staggered back down the hillside path. When the occasional passing hiker looked at my dirty, bloodied face with some alarm, I gave a bland smile and they hustled off (I guess I�d rush away from me too). Hmm. Maybe I should wash up and clean off the blood. Towards the bottom of the hill, there was a restaurant I hadn�t noticed on my way up. They didn�t seem to be open for dinner yet, but there was staff inside. I knocked on the door.
I couldn�t speak much of any German yet (I took a year when I went to Brown thinking it would impress Alithea, but this was foolish, as the bad German I spoke after only one year of the language opened me up to scathing criticism, while not knowing any German at all was excusable and didn�t garner me any flak). But I did know the words for �water, please�. I figured it should be clearly apparent to whoever answered that I�d had some sort of accident and wanted to clean up. A young man came to the door.
�Guten tag. Wasser, bitte?�
I was confronted by a totally uncomprehending stare. Maybe I�d used the wrong word. Maybe there was a lingering cultural desire to winnow out the inferior and the fact that I�d fallen so stupidly proved I was totally unworthy of help. Or maybe it actually wasn�t at all apparent what the hell had happened to me. All the guy knew was that a filthy, bloody person had come to the door asking for water in bad German.
He shook his head at me with a flood of words I couldn�t understand. I�d imagine he said something along the lines of: �I�m sorry, you dirt-covered freak, but please go away. We�ll have patrons in a bit and I don�t want you to frighten them. You must want water to drink, but you�ll have to get it someplace else, you filthy vagabond. Whatever your problem is, I want no part of it. Just leave here.� He closed the door in my face.
I made my way down the rest of the hill and washed up in the train station bathroom.
� 2006 Geoff Gladstone
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