Fitness is BAD for your Health

Since I’ve known Cindy - almost forty years now - she has been a fitness enthusiast.  She ran the Grandma’s Marathon in Minnesota in 1978 and has been running ever since. No matter where in the world we are, she runs and runs.  Until last June - when she was found to have a stress fracture in her foot and was told to not run until it healed. So she listened to her doctor’s advice (she’s an enthusiast, not a nut) and started to ride a bike, do floor exercises and continue her upper body strength with chin-ups using a secured bar in our dressing room closet doorway.  That was great until today!

Early this morning we were getting ready to exercise and pack for our trip to Greensboro, NC to spend the last few days of summer with dear friends.  I was about to go out the door for my walk when I heard a gut-wrenching shout from Cindy. I ran back in and she was sitting on the stairs, white as a ghost and sweating profusely.  The bar had separated from the wall mounts while she was at the top of her chin-up. Down she went, breaking her fall with her right arm, and she was in terrible pain. We hastily grabbed our medical cards and IDs and headed for the ER in our local hospital. We were there in ten minutes and in fifteen she was being ushered into a triage room where the staff began to treat her.  Four hours later we left with Cindy’s wrist, having been broken in two places, in a cast and instructions to get some Oxycodone and make sure to rest. (I’ll spare you the play by play of pain, first getting a ring off her finger that was terribly swollen, and then the fiasco of the team trying to pull and prod her wrist into position before they immobilized it. Yikes.)

She will need to have surgery to pin everything back together but we can’t even make an appointment do anything until Tuesday ... Happy Labor Day!!

She is a trooper and never lets anything get her down, but I’ve never seen her in such pain and it has lasted all day long. Finally, now at 7:30 pm, she is able to eat something and sit up and her color has returned - but goodness, what a long time to suffer.  We are optimistic that she’ll be able to get her surgery done by Wednesday or Thursday and then begin the long process of healing. Luckily all of her orchestra sessions are over for now since her bowing arm won’t be functional for months.

How was your Labor Day??

PS  Living in West Virginia, the epicenter of the opioid crisis in the USA, we hear a lot about how pills like Oxycodone are flooding the black market and can be sold for $40 to $80 a pill.  Cindy’s prescription was for 15 pills and it cost us 33 cents! You can see how someone might be tempted to make a little money on a relative’s prescription.