About a month ago, I came home from playing with my church’s music group at a nursing facility. We played a doubleheader, doing a set in the memory care wing, then another in the personal care area.
Because of my facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD), I’ve stopped doing back-to-back performances, aside from a couple times a year with the church group. Overdoing it causes me too much discomfort.
Gary, our guitar player, drove me home and pushed me into the garage. I told him that I was planning on some down time, relaxing with a couple of ibuprofen tablets and a heating pad. Doubleheaders can do that to me, but I had no idea how much this would be necessary.
Cellphone and garage door opener to the rescue
The way it’s supposed to work is as follows: I’ll sit in the garage, slide out of my vest, and exchange my shoes for my slippers. My driver will get me to where I can reach my wheelchair. After that, I’m able to transfer and do everything I need to do independently.
Not this time around. Gary had positioned me near the door that separates our garage from the laundry room. This positioned me right beside the chair I use to change out of my shoes, remove my vest, and pull my slippers on. I locked the brakes of the wheelchair and stood up. Then I turned around to move it out of the doorway. So far, so good.
With the brakes locked, it takes a little effort to turn the wheelchair around so I can unlock the brakes and move it aside. I bent over and grasped the arms of the wheelchair to turn it around. As I did so, my posterior made contact with the door to the laundry room, which flew open — and down I went.
I found myself flat on my back, half in the laundry room and half in the garage. The wheelchair had toppled over onto my legs. I was unable to roll over or sit up. My first thought was, “This must be what an upside-down turtle feels like.”
My wife, Wendy, wasn’t home, and my daughter, Jill, was in another city for work. No one was there to give me a hand.
I definitely needed help. Fortunately, I hadn’t had time to take off my vest. My cellphone and the garage door remote were still in my pockets. I called Gary and told him I’d fallen and needed some help. He hadn’t gone too far and immediately turned around to give me a hand.
I asked him to beep his horn when he got to the house and I’d pop open the garage door for him. Gary arrived and set the wheelchair aside. He helped me sit up. I told him I could get back on my feet if I could get to our stairs, but first, I asked him to put my vest and shoes on the chair in the garage, where I keep them. When I got back on my feet, the last thing I wanted to do was backtrack to the garage.
Frequent falls are a recent phenomenon for me. I’ve had to use the stairs to get myself back on my feet several times over the last few months.
It wasn’t pretty, but I managed to scoot through the laundry room and the hallway on my butt. With a little help from Gary, I turned over and got on my hands and knees. I crawled up to the second step, turned over and sat down.
From that point, I was able to stand up and get seated on my stair lift.
After multiple assurances that I would be OK from that point on, Gary left and I made my way up the stairs. I always position my walker within easy reach from my stair lift, so I had no further trouble.
I made a bathroom stop before allowing myself to settle into my easy chair. I took some ibuprofen and fired up the heating pad.
I assessed the damage and decided to put the heating pad on my left elbow first. It was the first part of me that had hit the floor and was quite sore. After a bit, I moved the heating pad to a spot between my shoulder blades that gets painful after using my arms for any length of time. From there, I moved the heating pad down to my left hip, which had apparently absorbed much of the impact of the fall.
After hearing about the fall, Wendy and Jill aren’t suggesting that I quit playing music. However, they’ve both requested that if no one is home, my driver should stick around until I get to my stair lift. This will be safer for me, but it’s just one more adaptation FSHD has forced on me.
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