The Fall and Its Aftermath
By Gene Aronowitz
I fell down a flight of sixteen steps inside our house on the evening of January 18, 2023.
My wife, Linda, later explained what had happened because I could not remember anything. She had been sitting in the living room, heard me fall, rushed over, and, fearing I had a heart attack, saw me at the bottom of the steps, gasping for breath with blood flowing from a gash on my head. She called her brother, Larry Friedrich, to help if I needed to be moved, but they decided to call an ambulance and have me transported to the emergency unit of Columbia Memorial Health, a medical facility in Hudson, New York.
Linda stayed with me during my two-night stay at the Columbia Memorial, sleeping fitfully in a chair in my room. The fact that I couldn’t remember anything about the fall or ambulance ride distressed me. I was 85 years old and thought that memory loss and an inability to focus could be signs of dementia.
Examinations the next day determined that I had a concussion, a broken collarbone, a slight vertebral fracture, and some blood in my skull, possibly caused by a burst blood vessel in my brain. The doctor said I needed to be examined by a neurosurgeon, but there were none available at that facility. I was sent by ambulance to the emergency unit of an affiliated hospital, the Albany Medical Center, where I experienced a series of events that were chaotic, frightening, and increasingly frustrating,
Linda did not go with me in the ambulance but drove to the Albany home of her brother, Dan Friedrich, and his wife, Lynne. They drove her to the hospital. When Linda located the small room in which I languished, she said I was lucky to be in there because the waiting room was a mess, filled primarily with drug addicts, those with gunshot or knife wounds, and disoriented homeless people. A staff member said that a preliminary examination indicated that I would not be admitted, so Linda asked Dan and Lynne to drive her back to their house so she could get our car. They had trouble getting into the parking lot because the hospital was suddenly in lockdown, presumably because someone was in there with a weapon.
Linda received a call from one of the interns, who said that I was ready to be discharged and would be placed in the hallway to wait for her. Disturbed by the specter of her 85-year-old, incapacitated husband lying helplessly on his gurney in an unprotected hallway, she insisted they keep me where I was, adding that she was only ten minutes away.
Linda helped me dress and spoke with a staff member, who said we should schedule a visit with an orthopedist. She got me into a wheelchair, wheeled me to our car, and drove the one-hour trip to our home, which we entered at about 2:00 AM on Saturday, January 21, the most anxiety-filled birthday of Linda’s life.
Linda said she felt lonely for the next few weeks because I was so uncommunicative. She was able to get me an appointment with an orthopedist at a Columbia Memorial Health branch. That physician said that because my collarbone break was so near my aorta, he was reluctant to treat me and thought a thoracic trauma specialist should see me. Clinic support staff made two referrals to those specialists, but one had recently retired, and the other did not treat conditions like mine. They then referred me to the Capital District Bone and Joint Center back in Albany. At that facility, the doctor said my collarbone was permanently deformed, but contrary to what the clinic physician had said, I was in no danger because of it. He said I could live relatively comfortably with the deformity. Then, chuckling, he told me I should give up any hope of being a neck model. Linda told him we needed to do something about my neck because my head had become stiffly arched toward my chest. The doctor arranged an appointment for me with one of his colleagues, a spine specialist.
She said I needed current MRI and CT scans, which were easy to request but exceedingly difficult to obtain. The Capital District Bone and Joint Center stated that it sent the referral and insurance approval to the Columbia Memorial Radiology Department, but that organization claimed it never received them. A repeated attempt was similarly unsuccessful. I called the two organizations repeatedly, but each continually blamed the other for the problem. We later learned that the difficulty was caused by a malfunctioning FAX machine at Columbia Memorial Radiology. I asked the Bone and Joint Center to email me the materials so I could deliver them personally. They said they were not permitted to email them and asked if I had a FAX machine. I didn’t, so they sent the documents by regular mail, which further delayed this. The delay was aggravating, but I later realized I might have been part of the problem. As it is said in the often-quoted statement from the Talmud, “We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are.” I had been angry at and frustrated with the staff of both institutions, thinking them incompetent, self-serving, uncaring, and unprofessional. My judgmental and provocative behavior probably irritated them, making it less likely that they would make any real effort to solve the problem.
Nevertheless, my spine doctor received the radiological materials and, at my next appointment, said the vertebral fracture had healed. She said I would benefit from physical therapy to treat what she termed cervical kyphosis, an exaggerated curve of the neck. They were going to send a referral by FAX to the Columbia Memorial Rehab Center in Hudson, but I had learned my lesson and insisted they hand the papers to me. Returning from Albany, I stopped by the Center to schedule an appointment. The physical therapy treatments helped some, and they gave me three illustrated pages of exercises to help me get my head straight.
As I write this, it has been almost three years since my fall. I still perform the exercises the physical therapist prescribed. I’m delighted and grateful that the fall did not kill me and that my disability is minor. That sense of relief is tempered by the fact that I still do not know how or why I fell down the steps. We installed a door at the top of the stairway, but even so, I cannot shake the uneasy sense that it could easily happen again.
A version of this memoir is included in the book 23 More Memoirs.