I Got to Ride in an Ambulance

On Tuesday, I was on my morning walk with our young dog Kepler, who isn’t very good at staying on his side. He usually trips me 2 to 3 times on every walk. On this day, when he tripped me the first time, I was quite proud of myself for regaining my balance quickly. I’ve been purposely taking Pilates classes on Apple Fitness+ in order to retain my balance as I get older. After patting myself on the back, we turned the corner and started walking again. And then he tripped me again.

This time, I did not regain my balance. Instead, I landed flat on my face. By on my face, I mean on my nose. The kindness of strangers was overwhelming. A lovely gentleman named Matt was walking his two dogs just up the street from me. He and I have exchanged pleasantries before, as dog people do. He came to my rescue. He called Steve at the gym and walked Kepler home for me.

While he was still there, a car pulled over on the side of the road, and a young middle school-aged girl jumped out of the car and ran up to me and offered me a giant pile of napkins. I don’t wanna be too gruesome, but when you smash your nose on concrete, it bleeds quite a bit. I thanked her for the napkins and asked her whether, by any chance, she had any ice. She ran back to the car and came back with three tiny little ice cubes she harvested from her water bottle. It was the sweetest thing, and those ice cubes felt like heaven.

Around this time, a city worker named Jose pulled over, talked to me for a quick minute, and then called emergency services. He stayed with me until the ambulance arrived. Here’s something I didn’t know emergency services do — they cleaned up all of the blood on the sidewalk. I don’t mean just rinsed it down with a water bottle — they used scrub brushes and everything. I suppose it’s so that people don’t start reporting a possible gunshot victim later in the day, but I was still surprised and happy no one had to see that.

While these humans came to my rescue, my technology failed me. I have talked on the show about how we all need to tell ourselves when we’re not in an emergency situation that if our Apple Watch ever says it detects a fall and we have fallen, do not immediately press “I’m OK.”

When I fell, my Apple Watch said, “It looks like you’ve taken a hard fall.| I did not scroll down to tell it I was OK. I tapped the immediately available, “emergency call SOS” button. Nothing happened. I tapped it again and again and again, and it never called emergency services.

My understanding was that if you don’t respond, it will eventually call Emergency services, but let’s check the docs:

According to the Apple Support Article:

If your watch detects that you’ve been immobile for about a minute, it will make the call automatically. After the call ends, your watch sends a message to your emergency contacts with your location letting them know that your watch detected a hard fall and dialed emergency services.

Evidently, I must have moved around enough that I thought I was just fine. But I do not know why it didn’t respond when I tapped the button to call emergency services.

I’ll rush to the end of the story, so you don’t worry too much about me. They did a CT scan of my neck, shoulders, and head and determined that I did not have a brain bleed nor any damage to my neck. But my nose is broken in more than one place. They can’t do anything about that until the swelling goes down, but I’ve scheduled an appointment with an ear, nose, and throat specialist on Monday to see what is to be done.

If you’ve ever seen my profile, you’ll know that I have a pronounced bump on my nose, which is from when I broke my nose running hurdles in high school. Lindsay suggested that perhaps this new break would fix that, but I suspect it’s more likely that I will end up looking like Owen Wilson after this if I don’t get it fixed.

I think the day after was the worst day. My face was horribly swollen to the point that it was partially shutting my eyes and everything was turning purple, but by the following day, I felt 100% better, and I wasn’t nearly as scary looking. The bruising was still cool, but I didn’t get nearly as much sympathy.

I know this wasn’t a tech story, but the live show had to look at me doing the recording, so I figured the rest of you should enjoy the story as well. I don’t wanna force anyone to look at how bad I looked after the accident, but some people are curious enough to want to see, so I put a link in the show notes to a couple of images for those with morbid curiosity!

My View of the Paramedics from the Ambulance

My Poor Mangled Face in the Ambulance

Day 2 — The Worst I Looked

Day 3 — Not Nearly as Horrifying

I’m pretty annoyed that the Apple Watch failed me, but I am encouraged that so many strangers came to my rescue. On one more tech angle to the story, my face was so mangled that Face ID on the iPhone did not recognize me. I had to reset it from scratch, but the next day my face looked so much worse that again, it didn’t recognize me, and I had to reset it. When my face got better again, I had to reset Face ID on the iPhone a third time. I’m not blaming the software; I barely recognized myself! But here’s the curious thing. The iPad’s Face ID never forgot who I was. It seems that it’s a bit more forgiving, which is very curious.

One final thought. I am not 100% certain that it was Kepler who tripped me. Steve and I and Kepler retraced my steps from that day, and Kepler pointed out that there was a concrete meter cover embedded in the sidewalk that was about 3/4 of an inch deeper than the rest of the sidewalk. He says that’s what I tripped over, but he has a conflict of interest in the outcome of the story.

I’m healing quickly, so don’t worry about me!