Ouch when no one is home

It was only a painfully sprained wrist – good for a few days of sympathy. An ace bandage insured physical and emotional support, but it could not eae the shock of encountering the reality of my vulnerability.
The sprain happened late, late, late one night when family circumstances ruled that I had the house to myself for a few days before a crowd of company descended on us. In anticipation of the visitors, I began cleaning.
Slowly, persistently I tackled the task. I didn’t have the energy I had had as a college student at home for winter break when I cleaned out my mother’s refrigerator and scrubbed down her stove. Nor did I have the absorption of a young mother creating a path through toys and laundry. In these my grandchildren years, my spring cleaning reflected the knowledge that with everyone out of the house I could eliminate, evacuate, and extricate anything I wanted, when and where I wanted, with no one blurting out protests or objections as I eased long-lost and forgotten items out the door. With the house and its clutter all to myself, the executive decisions regarding what would still be there when the rest arrived were all mine.
That is the advantage of having the house to myself.
It was great. I cleaned cat hair off the couch, moved a dresser from one bedroom into another, re-arranged rooms and filled the car with donations for the re-sale shop.
I even got down on my hands and knees to spot clean the trail across the bedroom carpet to the bathroom. When I was done, I took a long step over the damp carpet to the bathroom doorway … where, unbeknownst to me the cleaning spray had settled on the tiled floor.
When it landed on the slippery floor, my foot slid into an impossibly stretched out step. I sat down very hard, catching my slide-fall-sit with my left hand. Pain shot up my arm and registered as a 5.5 in my brain. A wave of dizziness hit me.
Suddenly, I didn’t care if the floor was damp, it was better to lay down than to fall back.
After a while the initial shock faded and my vision cleared. From the vantage point of the damp floor I studied my clean house, bereft of its family after 20 years.
I looked at the phone on the other side of the carpeted room. I could not reach it from where I lay. Fortunately, I didn’t need to call anyone for help but, as I laid there I realized no one was expecting to see me or talk with me for several hours. And, it was too late at night for anyone to call just to chat – they would assume I had gone to sleep hours ago.
That is the disadvantage of having the house to myself.
Since, I wasn’t seriously hurt and the dizziness had dissipated, I sat up and crawled off to bed. I woke up feeling every muscle in my body and the throb of pain in my swollen wrist. The urgent need to clean had diminished immensely.
After a morning of deep frowns and grimaces accompanied by deep, pain-cleansing breaths, I decided to have the doctor check it out. As he examined the wrist he said the most common fracture occurs when a person does exactly as I had done and reaches down to stop a fall. He didn’t think, however, that it was broken.
The x-ray agreed – it was just a sprain. Only my sense of invulnerability was shattered – and no x-ray in existence can photograph that damage.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times.)


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