.....My wife would say that I got really interested in the increasingly important medical issue of preventing falls in the elderly because, as she won’t let me forget, “You’re no spring chicken, my dear, more like a bruised old capon,” (to be fair, she’s dead on, but I wish she weren’t so brutally honest), but the truth is that I’ve been quite interested in this issue for a long time now, ever since, in fact, my wife and I took one of our annual hiking holidays, which as is too often the case, turned out to be anything but a “holiday” or what my wife calls “fun”.
.....You see, for some reason I had allowed my wife to talk me into hiking the West Coast Trail, a 76-km up-and-down and up-and-down and up-and-down muddy trek along the rugged west side of Vancouver Island from Bamfield to Port Renfrew along a path originally forged by sailors who’d been ship-wrecked off the coast and who were trying to get back to civilization (and I doubt that any of those soaked, |
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tired near-death sailors tried to convince the doubters among them that this hike would be “fun”).
.....Anyway, on about the 4th or 5th day out, we came across one of those 50 or 60-foot ravines that can only be traversed
via a frighteningly thin, rain-slicked log (did I mention that as part of the “fun” on the WCT, it rains every day so that you never get completely dry, or warm, or clean?), and since the only alternative at that point is to go back, which is an even worse idea than going straight ahead, we started across, slowly and hesitantly, to be sure, since we were both carrying 40-45 pound packs on our backs |
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(another example of what my wife thinks of as “fun”), and half-way across, I stumbled slightly and to my intense surprise and immediate horror (there was a lot of “down” to see on either side of that log), I seemed unable to correct my fall, although I did, thank god, mostly through plain old dumb luck.
.....That was when I realized for the first time just how much my balance had unknowingly deteriorated (in fact, it had slalomed downhill), a discovery that was nearly instantly dramatically brought home to me when 3 young guys ran up behind us and sped right over that space without the slightest slip or hesitation.
.....But believe me, folks, nearly everyone reading this (especially seniors) is suffering from a similar problem, although many of you still don’t know it, because as we age, everything either dries up |
