Tom Foolery

Still +Time, So Far

It’s Veterans Day and retired military makes me part of it. “Thank you for your service” folks say to me. The ER nurse at BayMed who tended to me after my fall Sunday was a twenty-plus year veteran, a retired Marine Corps officer. When I told him I was a retired Navy commander with twenty years and served with Marines during the Vietnam War, we found that we had served in the same class ships. Thank you for your service.

What brought me to this point of thought in the wee hours: awareness of a new anxiety at getting out of bed, walking in the dark and facing the stairs. Veterans Day morning string research online, googling how to overcome fear in combat segues to falling among the elderly fades to a new acronym: FOF. Never heard of it. Common among the elderly. Fear of Falling. I’ve now fallen five times in the past six months, each time unsettling, bloody ugly and painful, and yet another lesson in care, how to get up, how to turn, this time to look down and watch where I’m walking.


Damaged do I look like an wounded combat veteran? No, I look like how I haven’t thought of myself but what I see: an old man who has had a fall. A couple times in life I’ve had an auto accident, the last time shortly after my father died in 1993. On a rainy November day on wet roads driving through Tallahassee to get Nicholas at school, I totalled my father’s car that my mother had just given me. Traumatic in many ways, the crash experience made me -- maybe wary is a good word -- of driving again. For a long time, but in its course the fear went away. But now, a bloody awful fall with a trip to the ER on a gurney in an ambulance and straight to a treatment room, gives me a new life experience. The new FOF may fade, or it may help me be more safety conscious. What I want to avoid is becoming afraid of life. Surely I can be more aware and cautious without taking fearfully to my mother’s lift chair.  

All this is part of life's fullest experience. Growing old may be simply a state of mind if you haven’t fallen. Suddenly it becomes something to observe as a project, aging as a fact of life that in spite of all the kidding around hadn’t occurred would actually get me too. 

Restoring +Time to good and anyway.

T