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Somebody asked me the other day, how I got started writing about Aging with Grace. My answer boiled down to waking up to some scary statistics that got piled on top of my experiences as a caregiver of two aging husbands, as well as my father and mother. I started writing a column for the Gulf Islands Driftwood in 2014 when almost 25 percent of Salt Spring Island’s population was sixty-five or more and our median age was fifty-three.
I thought I’d write for one year, but I was still at it when the 2016 census numbers rolled out. Our median age is now fifty-five (compared to forty-one for the rest of the nation). Thirty percent of us are over sixty-five and another 20 percent are between fifty-five and sixty-five. Four hundred are over eighty-five.
You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley.
You’ve got to walk it by yourself.
Ain’t nobody else gonna walk it for you.
You’ve got to walk it by yourself.
But now that I’ve been writing my column for five years, I’ve learned an important lesson. We’re not alone. If we support each other as we embrace our journeys, we can keep hale and hearty by walking together. And when it’s time to move on toward end times perhaps our pace will be slower, but if we stick together, we’ll still be doing the best we possibly can for ourselves, and for one another.
“Onward and upward!” I declared with a smile. And then . . . I fell flat on my face. I could have broken my nose and my glasses, but – lucky me! – I wasn’t facing forward. Instead, I’d been looking back over my shoulder watching my friend Lynn astride her bicycle as she was gathering speed to climb a steep hill near my home. Meanwhile, I was walking in the opposite direction, unaware I’d soon be flying off the edge of the pavement (which was an inch or two higher than the adjacent gravel shoulder).
Fortunately, I was carrying a four-litre jug of milk. I dropped it as I fell, and my upper chest landed on it with full force. The jug burst, breaking my fall but knocking the wind out of me. It’s my guess it had the same degree of compassion as an automobile air bag. My right cheek was covered with a slurry of milk and grit and I had a few bruises and scrapes on my hands and knees, so it could have been a whole lot worse.
Chances are you also have a tale about some terrible tumble you’ve taken. That’s because the older we get, the more likely we are to fall and, if we have osteoporosis, the more likely we are to break a bone.
Orthopedic surgeon Erica J. Mitchell reported in 2013 that as many as 50 percent of all women and one third of all men over age sixty-five will experience a fragility fracture. This is far more than will have cancer, a heart attack, or a stroke.
In case you didn’t know it, falls among seniors are especially serious, even life-threatening. In 2005, the Public Health Agency of Canada reported that almost 62 percent of injury-related hospitalizations for seniors are the result of falls. It turns out the senior fall-related injury rate is nine times greater than among those under age sixty-five. Moreover, almost half of seniors who fall experience a minor injury while as many as 25 percent sustain a serious injury such as a fracture or a sprain. Of most concern is that falls cause more than 90 percent of all hip fractures in seniors and 20 percent will die within a year of such a fracture.
It gets worse. The Public Health Agency of Canada issued a second report in 2014 announcing that self-reported fall injuries not requiring hospitalization increased by 43 percent between 2003 and 2009/2010. During that period, the majority of them resulted in broken or fractured bones, and more than one third of fall-related hospitalizations among seniors were associated with a hip fracture. Worse still is that the number of deaths due to falls increased by 65 percent from 2003 to 2008. We can understand that a serious fracture due to falling might land us in the hospital and eventually in a nursing home, but how many of us have thought about how hospitalization actually increases the risk of falling when we’re there for other reasons? This is primarily due to being in an unfamiliar environment, being weak because of illness, and/or being disoriented because of medication. A single fall may result in a fear of falling and this can begin a downward spiral of reduced mobility, leading to loss of function and then to greater risk of additional falls.
My mother is a case in point. She fell and broke her hip when she was ninety-one. She was relatively strong, both physically and mentally, so she recovered. But over the next few years, she had several more falls, including two in one week. As a result, her fear of falling became intense. Just turning her in bed elicited extreme anxiety: “I’m falling! I’m falling!” she’d shriek as we began the roll necessary for changing her sheets. Once she grabbed my arm so tightly her fingernails broke my skin.
We don’t want any of this to happen to us, so let’s take steps now to reduce our chances of falling: