A friend of mine (over 55 years old) was helping an elderly neighbor couple (both over 90 years old) trim a tree when he fell. He would have landed on his head, but he got hung up on a branch and spun around on the way down. He landed on his feet, eventually.
I was recounting this to my sister-in-law, a retired physical therapist, and she said, “He must have broken his calcaneus.”
“He broke his left heel and his pride,” I said.
“Calcaneus,” she said again.
“There was nothing calculated about it,” I said.
“Breaking your calcaneus happens only one way,” she said. “Whenever people came to see me for therapy and had broken their calcaneus I’d ask: ‘So did you fall off the roof or out of a tree?’ Their answer was always either ‘roof’ or ‘tree.’ ”
I guess you need both height and speed in order to bust this bone. My friend had both, and so he broke his heel.
The elderly couple paid him $180 for trimming their trees. The elderly woman took him to the emergency room. Guess what the co-pay was?
$180.
My friend’s wife was not happy. She counts on his help, and he’s out of commission for eight weeks because he can’t put any weight on his busted calcaneus. He’s treading lightly. She’s mostly unhappy because she told him not to go up any ladders, ALONE. I guess the calcaneus bone is connected to the ear bone, and he broke that right before he broke his calcaneus.
Which reminds me, a few years ago, an acquaintance broke his foot. (He was also of a certain age.) This seems like more than a pattern; it seems like an epidemic among men of a certain age.
As he showed me the swollen mass, I said; “Geez your foot looks like a Kleenex™ box.” I struggled to see any toes in the swollen mass of stretched, blue skin. His friend, helping him hobble around and holding his crutches, shook a crutch at me and said, “That’s not a very nice thing to say.”
“Oh, she’s a writer,” he offered. “She’s just describing what she sees.”
I wanted to tell him thanks for not taking it personally. It really did look like a Kleenex™ box; swollen enough to obscure his toes and with corners, kind of. You don’t forget corners. Not on a foot.
So much for getting smarter with age. I think there comes a time when you have to face the fact that you cannot scale that ladder and clean those gutters, trim that tree, or re-shingle the roof.
Give the work to the young, will you? They need gravity-defying experience, too. Though there’s a limit.
So just one last question for my sister-in-law: “How many women came to you for physical therapy for a broken calcaneus or calcanei or whatever the plural is?
“I never saw one,” she said.