Ouch!

When you're 20 and you slip and fall, you jump right back up and go about your business. You don't report it to your friends because it is more embarrassing than it is painful. But when you are 75 and you slip and fall, that is a major event! Of course my point is: that is what happened to me Monday. The copious rain that we are receiving this El Nino winter has made mud of all the dirt places around the house. When I took out the trash I slipped on one of those places and went down hard and fast. I stayed there on my hands and knees for a full minute or more, realizing that I have not broken any major bones, and there was no place where the blood was pulsing out. So I awkwardly dragged myself up to my feet, completed my task, and came into the house to change my clothes and wash my hands. Only then did I discover that I had scraped my forearm, and it was bleeding. In fact I later discovered a blood smear on our white front door. As I washed my wound I discovered that there was a rather pronounced lump near by elbow. It didn't really hurt, but it looked like the lump on the head of a cartoon character after he is hit over the head with a baseball bat. Since I had a med check with my diet program that night, I asked the doctor about it and she said it was a hematoma and would probably be okay. What all that trauma did do, however, was raise my blood pressure. They could not get a healthy number to report to the computer that night. In four different tries the lowest number was a 145. I generally run 125 or so in the systolic. She said it was probably due to the fall I had taken (it occurred only an hour or so before my check in). Since then I have found my BP to be back to the 120s or 130s.

This reminds me of a few other injury stories, but that's for other posts.