On the morning of Thursday, July 15, 1971, I was hit broadside by a speeding car on my left side while riding my bicycle through a busy intersection, thrown 30 feet and ended up shattering my left femur. The accident was my own fault, as I had, for the umpteenth time, overslept my alarm clock and was going to be late for a summer school business typing class that I was taking. I saw the car that hit me out of my peripheral vision but in a split second decision, decided that I had enough time to cross the street to get to the other side. I could not have been more wrong, obviously. I was taken to Robinson Memorial Hospital, our county hospital here, and there spent nearly two months in traction. It would turn out to be a long and miserable summer as a result. I was frequently bored, frustrated, angry, lonely and depressed. In hindsight, it's rather surprising that I was not killed, but I was a strong, healthy and athletic young girl, to which I attribute my survival. It also saved me from what should rightfully have been a compound fracture. I am lucky that one of my uncles, now retired, was an orthopaedic surgeon who kept tabs on my treatment and progress and made sure that I was being cared for to his satisfaction. I have long felt a special bond with that uncle for being there for me in a time of great need. That whole experience forced me to do a great deal of growing up that summer. I never expected to face my own mortality so early on in life but that is exactly what happened. At the end of my long hospitalization, I was imprisoned in a waist-to-toes cast after the bone had been set and sent home to recuperate. I had lost 30 pounds in the hospital and ended up being pretty weak, so I wasn't easily able to haul around that heavy cast on my lower body. I ended up being pretty much wheelchair bound until the cast came off some six weeks later. By that time, I had not used my leg for some 3 months, so there wasn't much left of it by the time the cast was removed. This would require my spending another six weeks on crutches until I could rebuild the muscles and strength in that leg to where I could walk unaided. All told, it was around 6 months from the time of the accident that I regained enough strength to be able to walk comfortably.
The problem was that when the cast was removed, the orthopaedic surgeon who treated my injury told me that I would have a length discrepancy in the broken leg but that my body could accomodate up to a one inch difference. As a result, I would not have to wear any sort of corrective lift, so for the next 27 years, I walked around with one leg noticeably shorter than the other one. My back constantly hurt but I began to suck it up and accept it as something I would learn to live with. It was not until the winter of 1997 that I began to experience some debilitating pain in my left hip that I began to become genuinely concerned. I went to my primary care doctor, who in turn sent me to an orthotics/prosthetics specialist in Akron. It was there that in 1998 that I was diagnosed with a one and a half inch discrepancy in my left leg, and from that point onward, I have worn a large lift on my left shoes. While I find this highly inconvenient at times, as I reflect on what happened to me 40 years ago, I feel incredibly grateful that I survived this horrible accident that by all rights probably should have killed me. It obviously wasn't my time yet. My being a strong, healthy athletic teenager is probably what saved my life and is as good an argument as any for staying in good physical condition. In fact, after I had made some recovery, I returned to athletic activity by founding the girls swim team at my High School. We didn't have one at the time and my doctor wasn't crazy about my engaging in any impact sports even a year after the accident, so swimming was suggested as a way both to regain lost physical strength and a way to regain some mobility that I had lost in the process. Looking back, I can say that it took literally several years before I had regained all of my physical strength to where I felt as good as I did before the accident. Swimming turned out to be the best thing I ever did for myself and I stayed with our swim team all the way through High School. In my senior year, I finally lettered in swimming, if only for the sheer persistance for staying with it so long. I was never a very strong swimmer and the highest I ever finished in any match was 4th place, (I usually finished 5th and more often, dead last at 6th), but I did it more for the sake of physical recovery from a devastating accident. I probably should return to swimming now that I am older and have some arthritis as a result of the old accident injuries I suffered so long ago. Maybe one of these days I will get back to doing something that is so good for me and will also help me to lose some middle aged weight gain that I very much desire to get rid of. Swimming is one of the best overall exercises for your body and has the advantage of no impact on my aging joints and it's also something I very much enjoy doing. I think I need to look into doing this again!
On the morning of Thursday, July 15, 1971, I was hit broadside by a speeding car on my left side while riding my bicycle through a busy intersection, thrown 30 feet and ended up shattering my left femur. The accident was my own fault, as I had, for the umpteenth time, overslept my alarm clock and was going to be late for a summer school business typing class that I was taking. I saw the car that hit me out of my peripheral vision but in a split second decision, decided that I had enough time to cross the street to get to the other side. I could not have been more wrong, obviously. I was taken to Robinson Memorial Hospital, our county hospital here, and there spent nearly two months in traction. It would turn out to be a long and miserable summer as a result. I was frequently bored, frustrated, angry, lonely and depressed. In hindsight, it's rather surprising that I was not killed, but I was a strong, healthy and athletic young girl, to which I attribute my survival. It also saved me from what should rightfully have been a compound fracture. I am lucky that one of my uncles, now retired, was an orthopaedic surgeon who kept tabs on my treatment and progress and made sure that I was being cared for to his satisfaction. I have long felt a special bond with that uncle for being there for me in a time of great need. That whole experience forced me to do a great deal of growing up that summer. I never expected to face my own mortality so early on in life but that is exactly what happened. At the end of my long hospitalization, I was imprisoned in a waist-to-toes cast after the bone had been set and sent home to recuperate. I had lost 30 pounds in the hospital and ended up being pretty weak, so I wasn't easily able to haul around that heavy cast on my lower body. I ended up being pretty much wheelchair bound until the cast came off some six weeks later. By that time, I had not used my leg for some 3 months, so there wasn't much left of it by the time the cast was removed. This would require my spending another six weeks on crutches until I could rebuild the muscles and strength in that leg to where I could walk unaided. All told, it was around 6 months from the time of the accident that I regained enough strength to be able to walk comfortably.
The problem was that when the cast was removed, the orthopaedic surgeon who treated my injury told me that I would have a length discrepancy in the broken leg but that my body could accomodate up to a one inch difference. As a result, I would not have to wear any sort of corrective lift, so for the next 27 years, I walked around with one leg noticeably shorter than the other one. My back constantly hurt but I began to suck it up and accept it as something I would learn to live with. It was not until the winter of 1997 that I began to experience some debilitating pain in my left hip that I began to become genuinely concerned. I went to my primary care doctor, who in turn sent me to an orthotics/prosthetics specialist in Akron. It was there that in 1998 that I was diagnosed with a one and a half inch discrepancy in my left leg, and from that point onward, I have worn a large lift on my left shoes. While I find this highly inconvenient at times, as I reflect on what happened to me 40 years ago, I feel incredibly grateful that I survived this horrible accident that by all rights probably should have killed me. It obviously wasn't my time yet. My being a strong, healthy athletic teenager is probably what saved my life and is as good an argument as any for staying in good physical condition. In fact, after I had made some recovery, I returned to athletic activity by founding the girls swim team at my High School. We didn't have one at the time and my doctor wasn't crazy about my engaging in any impact sports even a year after the accident, so swimming was suggested as a way both to regain lost physical strength and a way to regain some mobility that I had lost in the process. Looking back, I can say that it took literally several years before I had regained all of my physical strength to where I felt as good as I did before the accident. Swimming turned out to be the best thing I ever did for myself and I stayed with our swim team all the way through High School. In my senior year, I finally lettered in swimming, if only for the sheer persistance for staying with it so long. I was never a very strong swimmer and the highest I ever finished in any match was 4th place, (I usually finished 5th and more often, dead last at 6th), but I did it more for the sake of physical recovery from a devastating accident. I probably should return to swimming now that I am older and have some arthritis as a result of the old accident injuries I suffered so long ago. Maybe one of these days I will get back to doing something that is so good for me and will also help me to lose some middle aged weight gain that I very much desire to get rid of. Swimming is one of the best overall exercises for your body and has the advantage of no impact on my aging joints and it's also something I very much enjoy doing. I think I need to look into doing this again!
4 comments:
DO look into swimming, Sally! I do it every day now after my boring gym workout and it feels so great! Not only is it good for the body, it's good for the soul. Makes me feel like a kid again, considering we spent most of the summer in a pool.
The biggest problem is time and finding out what is open and when and whether it fits into my schedule. If I didn't have to work, it would be easy, but being a working person, it makes it a bit tough because I'm not sure that I can find a pool that is open every evening. We don't have the advantage of the Therme like you do there in Erding. And not having to work like I do, you are at more of an advantage time-wise. You can pretty much go whenever you want, I can't. I have to fit things into a work schedule that can vary day to day depending on staffing needs at work. We're still downsizing at work and I am working harder and for less money than I made 5 years ago, so there's another consideration: money. Gas prices are $1 a gallon higher than they were this time last year and I haven't even gotten so much as a cost-of-living raise in 5 years plus my health insurance premiums have risen an average of 10% per year while the coverage offered has gone drastically down, meaning I can't afford medical care anymore. So I have to very, very tightly budget things so that I do not run out of money before month's end.
It's getting tougher and tougher to survive in this Depression that we're in, and anyone who calls it a recession and says it ended in 2009 is deluding themselves......but I will still look into what pools are available around the area, what hours they are open and the cost. I just wish I had the advantage of not having to work like you do. I envy your freedom. I wanted to retire in 2 years, but that's looking more and more impossible as the economy fails to recover and continues its steady downward slide.....
I looked into Memorial Gym's pool and it's open every day in the summer until 8:30 pm, and once school is in session, it's open until 10:30 pm. You can get a monthly membership there for under 50 bucks, which would be for the whole fitness center (which is open until 11 pm!), an excellent investment for your health. Gasoline prices should not affect that in that you could just walk up there (more exercise, too!). Seems you are finding more reasons NOT to take action than to just go for it. You are lucky to be within walking distance of such nice facilities.
Ah, well, then, I will look into that. Roosevelt's pool is only open from 6:30 in the morning until 4:00 pm in the afternoon Monday through Friday. That pretty much eliminated that choice because I work until 4:00 and some days until 4:30. So that choice is right out. You just have to understand how tired I am at the end of a long work day. I spend an hour of my day, a half hour in the morning and a half hour in the evening, commuting to and from work on a very busy freeway. That in itself can get mighty exhausting, plus doing the work of several people each day and trying to squeeze it all into an 8 hour workday is also very tiring. We're downsizing at work but we are expected to maintain our same level of productivity with fewer workers, so it can get very tiring to try to keep up the quality of work we are known for when there are fewer people and less time to do it. Most days I come home from work and go to sleep, I am so tired. Stress can be a real factor here and I know that exercise can help alleviate it.
I AM going to look into what KSU has to offer, though. Money's extremely tight right now so there's not a whole lot of slack in the budget due to rising food and gas prices, but I am down to eating two meals a day, skipping dinner every night, to stretch the budget a bit. If I eat dinner at all, it's usually just a bowl of salad and that's it. Remember, I'm single and self supporting and although I have a full time job, the US economy is in the dumps, gas and food prices are soaring, I haven't gotten so much as a cost-of-living raise in 5 years AND my pay has been cut by rapidly rising health insurance premiums. So just because I have a job doesn't necessarily mean I am swimming in dough. It's tough making it in this economy on one income. You really need two incomes anymore to make it. One income isn't enough to survive anymore.
Had I the energy at the end of my day, I'd work two jobs so I could survive, but I just don't have the stamina to be working 60-80 hours per week. Most everyone I know, though, is doing just that, working more than one job. In some cases, people I know are working THREE jobs just to survive this brutal economy. Right now, one job totally drains me. Means I just have to work harder to save money, and skipping meals has become my answer to stretching every dollar till it screams. Hate to do that, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do.....
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