Health Hazards

I have decided there are a lot of things possibly more hazardous to my health than the little things I am addicted to that everyone keeps telling are gonna kill me some day. Some of these are much more innocuous too than those cigarettes are. At least with them, I have the surgeon general's warning on each pack that they COULD be hazardous.

But how many things are there in one's one home that you really think of as being a possible hazard? Look around your surroundings and I suppose you can think of some, if used improperly could harm you. Ok, let's face it, in all likelihood, there is probably something lurking in everything around us that, given the right set of circumstances could hurt a person but we really don't give each and every thing we own that much scrutiny most of the time.

I learned tonight that a simple thing -picking up a piece of paper that had fallen onto the floor can end up as a very painful experience.

Here's what happened:

I'd fallen asleep on the couch earlier this evening and woke up around midnight. When I fell asleep, my daughter had just left to run up the road and pick up a copy of tonight's local daily newspaper. I roused slightly when she came home with the paper (meaning just that I had heard her come home but couldn't bring myself to open my eyes at that time - just needed a "couple more winks" ya know. But at midnight, I was awake from having had a nap of a little over two hours. So I got up and saw Mandy had left the paper laying atop my printer -which is, of course, on my desk and adjacent to the monitor.

I sat down on my chair - a now very worn (padding exposed on both corners) "executive-style" computer desk chair (the kind with the arm rests, ya know, and of course, on wheels.) I reached up and picked up the sections of the paper and as I did, the bloody advertisement inserts fell on the floor and I leaned over to pick them up.

In doing that, I totally unbalanced the chair, which then proceeded to upend, tossing my down to the floor. In the process of my downhill slide, my right upper arm managed to bang hard, very hard, against the pull-out where my keyboard rests, and I landed on the floor, right leg bent under my butt -same position as it almost always is in as I sit here and surf or type. My left leg was extended straight out.

This little event must have been hard enough to shake the house because in a matter of about two minutes, I could hear footsteps on the stairs and Mandy and Bill both came rushing into the living room to check on me. There was a bit of noise but that was mostly caused by the wheels on the chair when they hit the waste can by my desk, upsetting it, spilling most of the papers in it on to the dining room floor.

Mandy looks at me with this really frightened look on her face as she says "Are you alright? MOM! Are you ok? Are you hurt?"

Bill is rubbing his eyes and asking "What the Hell happened?"

Mandy squats down on the floor in front of me, giving me orders to show her my leg. I think she thought because it was under my butt I most likely had twisted it and probably had broken it or something. But the leg was fine; actually both of them were ok. My only injury, as mentioned above, was to the upper arm and considering a slight tap will cause a bruise on me, by tomorrow evening, my arm will probably look like someone had beaten me severely.

And, I'm sitting here in this weird position and laughing my ass off at just how stupid -and clumsy - one old broad can be.

What lesson can one learn about these things?

Picking up, cleaning up things that have fallen to the floor can be hazardous to your health. My advice is to leave the lay there and get someone much younger to pick them up later!

Household+hazards" rel="tag">Household hazards
dangerous+furniture" rel="tag">dangerous furniture
Clumsy+old+people" rel="tag">Clumsy old people
Home+accidents" rel="tag">Home accidents