Craig and I have a mutual friend with Tim and Loni. She is elderly, a widow, and lives alone. Tim checks on her fairly often to be sure she is okay. He told me that she had had a bad fall recently necessitating a trip to the ER and stitches in her face. A few days later, she fell again and is covered in bruises.
A big part of her problem is that, although she has one, she refuses to use a walker, and so when she loses her balance, down she goes. Tim told me about the "lecture" he gave her to get her to use that walker and protect herself from future falls. I'm paraphrasing, but here's the gist of it:
"I told her, you know I'm a doctor, right?" In an aside to me, he added, "Now, I'm not a medical doctor, I'm a doctor of entomology (insects) but I still know what I'm talking about."
"Now, have you ever watched a beetle fall down when they are walking? Of course you haven't because they don't fall down - they have six legs. Even if they lose one, they still don't fall down."
(At this point, I was wondering how on earth this applied to our friend. I was soon to be enlightened.)
"How many legs do you have? Two! That's right, just two, and if one wobbles, you fall down."
(I still wasn't sure how he was going to connect this.)
"You have two legs and your walker has," and Tim pointed at the ground with his finger for emphasis, "One, two, three, four legs. Two plus four is six. Use your walker and you won't fall down."
Brilliant! And it made me smile (as I am sure it did her.)
Now let's hope that she takes his sage advice.
