Thursday, February 18, 2021

 Thursday, February 18, 2021

             Yoga went by so quickly this morning. I think I got both my legs higher on one stretch. I felt the difference was in my back, leveling out my hips rather than making adjustments in my back rather than my hip joints. Yvette had us do a gentle roll to the left and right to stimulate the spine. When I roll to the right, I can easily bring myself back to lying flat on my back. I can’t do that when I roll to the left. The muscles on the left side of my body are not strong enough. It is hard to know if these muscles were damaged before I fell down the flight of stairs at 38 or not.  

            I finally figured out how long my flight down those stairs was. I had checked ceiling heights in office buildings constructed in the early 1900s in NYC. They were 15 to 20 feet. I was interested in construction, fixing ceilings and walls in my spare time. I lived in a Brooklyn brownstone apartment at that time. The ceilings were 10 feet high. The ones at Hunter were much higher than that. I figured they were 20 feet. Because I had been working on solving math problems with J and D, I finally realized that I could figure out the length of that fall. I checked online for the angle of stairs in a flight of stairs. Plenty of information on that: 30 to 37 degrees incline.   I figured the top of the stairs was probably 10 feet from the floor below. So that was the height of the triangle. I was going to try to reconstruct the staircase with cardboard.

Then I realized I could figure it out mathematically. I figure ½ inch equals 1 foot for the height. Then how could I figure out the incline without a protractor? It finally occurred to me to look up the formula for a right triangle with one other angle being 30 degrees. There it was on the Internet. The answer: the flight of stairs was 20 feet. Then there was the landing, which was another 9 or 10 feet.   My flight was a straight line from the point I pushed off from the step to the moment when I hit the wall at the end of the landing, the hypotenuse of the triangle, so not 30 feet, more like 20 to 25. 

        I reshared the story of the fall with people who had heard before, but I said something new they hadn’t heard. I didn’t have a single bruise on my body. There is no way I had any contact with the stairs on my way down. The only contact was with that wall, resulting in a torn left rotator cuff and some pretty jammed-up muscles. As I dropped to the floor after contact, my dance training kicked in again; I turned to land on my fat pads. They absorbed the shock. I get a little freaked out if I think about it too much. I figure the people who saw my Wonder Woman act had to be more traumatized than I was.  

       As I came to at the bottom of the landing, the young man who stood over me asked if I was okay, assuming I was paralyzed. No. I just got up and went off to my class as if nothing had happened. I wasn’t in pain. I didn’t realize there was any problem until the next morning when I couldn’t lift my left arm high enough to wash my hair. “Michael, I think I have a problem.”  I dealt with the problem with a chiropractor and exercise until the problem took a turn for the worse when I was 62. Then I had rotator cuff surgery. Best thing I ever did for myself. It may also have been good that I waited. That surgery was arthroscopic; I wasn’t filleted.

            My renewed awareness of the weakness on the left side of my body made me change my gait. I am pushing my right shoulder farther back as I push off on my left leg.

            It was a do-nothing day. I spent time sleeping and reading. Ah! I had two clients and wished they would cancel- and then the Internet went down. Too bad!! 

            I finally watched a movie Jean my friend, recommended, Attenborough’s a Life on this Planet. I only got to see half of it before it was time to go to bed. Somewhat depressing, God, we’re a destructive species. News! We’re about to land on Mars. Oh, yay. Another planet for man to destroy. Depressing.