A Little Tumble

CFS bit me in the ass yesterday but not in the way you would expect.

I was out on the deck grabbing a pillow to do a little sunbathing.  I was close to the deck edge and turned suddenly.  I don't know if I got dizzy or over confident but I stepped down suddenly and without looking.  I missed the step and ended up on my back in the grass staring at the sky wondering what the heck just happened.

Somehow I managed to twist my right ankle, scrape my right knee, scrape the top of my left foot and wedge the corner of the bottom step under my left knee cap.  I had a great case of road rash and had to pick rocks out of the bloody gashes.  And I was in a HUGE amount of pain.

I managed to get up.  For some reason I managed to not curse my head off.  I hobbled over to the garden hose and did a preliminary wash off.  I hobbled into the house and had kids' girlfriend run and get the Bactine out of the bathroom.  I liberally washed both wounds with it.  Dabbing blood and the cut.  I tried the knee out to make sure I could flex it because I knew it would stiffen up very quickly.

Of course hubs was in another state doing autocross racing at the time.  I knew if I called him he would freak out so I waited.  I wasn't dying.  The walk in clinic was open until 8pm.  I could just patch it up and wait until later in the day to let him know that I would not be making dinner after all.

Thank goodness the kid's gf was around.  She was really helpful.  She fetched things for me and offered to help in anyway she could.  Unfortunately she can't drive so a quick trip to the clinic was out of the question.

I finally got the nerve to call hubs and told him what had happened.  He said he would be home in about two hours and would figure out what to do then.  When he arrived he told me that the clinic would probably blow me off since it was late on a Sunday night.  I would prefer to see my ortho guy anyway.  He has been great with my joint problems in the past.  I also wanted to see how I felt in the morning.

When I got up this morning, I had deep jarring pain when I put weight on my leg.  Not the surface pain of the cut but deeper joint pain.  Not good.  I peeled the bandages off and my entire knee was swollen and pink with road rash.  At least it wasn't infected yet.  I put ice packs on it when I could tolerate them and called my primary care doctor.  He was on vacation.  I asked the secretary if I could see my ortho doc and she arranged it for me.  Yay!!

My kid miraculously had the day off work so he was available to drive me.  The doc was worried about my knee as well.  She said it didn't look good and the fact I hooked the knee cap with the step corner didn't bode well.  I had a series of x-rays done by the ortho specialist consisting of a bunch of odd angles so they can see all sides of the joint and even underneath the knee cap itself.  No fractures!!  Yay!!  So I have a nice bone bruise on the left knee and a slight sprain on the right ankle.   They gave me a really cool ice pack to wear and I have to go back in two weeks so they can check on me.

I'm not normally a klutz but this illness has turned me into one.  I am constantly dropping things, knocking things over and now apparently falling.  This is bad.  It makes me worried.  Can I no longer be left alone?  Is my decision making, balance, and vertigo bad enough that I can't be trusted to be by myself anymore?   This seriously worries me.  Probably more so since a good friend just lost his mother to a nasty fall.  She couldn't catch herself and got a nasty concussion that finally took her life.  Falling is serious.  If I hadn't rolled over and landed in the grass I would have faceplanted on the stone patio.  It could have been way worse than it was.  I came one foot away from having a nasty concussion.  As it is my rib cage is really sore.  I can hardly wait until my chiropractor comes back from vacation and puts everything back where it belongs.

But falling.  Now what do I do?  I'm usually pretty good about going slowly, looking where I'm going, looking at the steps before I go up or down them.  But there was that little lapse of judgement.  In typical ADD CFS fashion I got distracted by a spider hanging off the edge of the cushion I had picked up.  Instead of looking where I was going, I span around too fast and  literally stepped into oblivion.

So I'm paying for that now with pain and swelling and bleeding.  Thank goodness it wasn't worse.  But now what do I do?  Do I have to have someone come and stay with me every time hubs goes out of town?  How embarrassing.  I'm only 50.  Gads!  Until this point I never felt like a burden to my family.  Even at my sickest.  I don't want people worrying about me.  For some reason that bothers me.  I don't want to burden family with unnecessary worry.  I always thought of myself as independent, even with hubs having to take over the bills and the driving and the housecleaning.  I always knew I could manage on my own if he wasn't around.  It was nice that he was doing it but I would figure out how to get along if he buggered off.  But now.   Now.  With the falling incident I can't possibly be on my own.  Someone has to be around.  Someone HAD to check up on me.  If I had knocked myself unconscious yesterday how long would I have laid on the ground until someone found me?  An hour?  Two?  Three?  Kid's gf was inside the house when I fell.  She had no idea that I fell.  I had told her I was going to lie down for a while.  She wouldn't have come looking for me for a long time.

This makes me feel so old and dependent and needy.  Ugh.  Now I'm worried.