It’s Still a Slider — The Broken Femur Edition

You may remember last June when I published a PSA entitled, “PSA — SOS Button for Apple Watch Fall Detection is a SLIDER!” I posted that after I had a hard fall while walking Kepler, which caused me to break my nose. After years of looking at the SOS button, when the Apple Watch detected my fall, I pushed that button over and over again, and it never called emergency services. It was only later that I discovered that the button is actually a slider.

Great news, I had the opportunity to test that slider this week! On Thursday, February 26, in the morning, I was walking Kepler on my left side, as a guy was with his little Boston Terrier on the grass to my right. Unfortunately, he had his dog on one of those retractable leashes, and the pup decided he wanted nothing more in this world than to meet Kepler. He dashed right in front of me with his leash at my ankles, basically clotheslining me.

As I fell, I remember thinking to roll onto my side so I didn’t hit my face again. I succeeded at that maneuver, but unfortunately, falling on my side broke my left femur. As it’s more colloquially known, I broke my hip!

As soon as I rolled onto my back, I knew it was broken. If you’ve ever broken a bone, you know why I knew — it’s what I call “wrong pain” — very different from any kind of tissue pain.

The Apple Watch detected my fall, so I dragged the slider to contact emergency services. At the same time, I had the dog owner call Steve. Poor Steve really is afraid every time I leave the house on a walk, and with good reason! To be fair, this time was not my fault!

In the Apple Watch app on iPhone, at the top level, there’s an option to set up Emergency SOS. Among other settings, you can set emergency contacts to be notified. I set up Steve, and our two kids, Lindsay and Kyle. Lindsay gave me a description of what happened on her end. She was in a meeting and got a notification on her watch, which she ignored because she was working. Then another one. Then another one. Finally, she looked down at her watch and saw a series of notifications all about my fall, up to and including that emergency services had arrived to scrape me up off the sidewalk.

That’s pretty much the end of the tech part of what happened, unless you want to see X-rays of what happened. The femur bone is the long bone from your knee up to your hip, with the ball on top that rotates around in the socket of your pelvis. The X-rays showed that there was a clean break diagonally across the bone. It’s below the ball, and goes from the lesser to greater tranchanter.

To fix it, the surgeon drilled a vertical hole down into the shaft of the femur to put in a rod, and then put a screw across the break through the rod to pull the two pieces together. Another screw goes sideways into the rod through my bone to stabilize the rod from rotating. The surgeon told me that it was a good break in that the bones did not shift, so he was able to “just” bolt me back together to hold things in place until the bone heals back together.

Here’s some fun color for the story. After I’d been given the blessed morphine and a nerve block for the excruciating pain that is a femur break, Steve ran home to feed Kepler and pick up our cat Grace from the vet. When he tried to come back before my surgery, he couldn’t get into the hospital.

Get this. While we were in the emergency room waiting for me to be admitted, we heard a guy hollering, sounding quite out of control. Evidently, a guy suspected of murder was being treated, and he escaped from the hospital and barricaded himself in a house near the hospital. The whole place was in lockdown with helicopters circling and SWAT teams to find the guy. They did find the guy and get him back into custody, but I didn’t have Steve holding my hand as I went in.

Now let’s talk about why you care. I’m in the hospital as I’m writing this up. Recovery from this is going to be a long haul. I won’t be allowed to put weight on my left leg for four weeks, and it will be around six months before I’m walking normally. I’ve started physical therapy, which is pretty hard. I can “walk” with a walker, where walking means holding just my toe to the ground on the left while supporting my weight on my right leg, alternating with using my arms to support me on the walker.

Besides being painful to move that left leg (even with narcotics), it’s actually brain work to teach yourself not to walk normally. I keep forgetting to point my left toe, and it actually hurts more to slide my left leg forward with it that way. As soon as I point, it’s way easier. I think PT might be all about practice to not do it wrong, while also gaining the strength to carry myself with my arms. Sadly, with all the working out I do, it’s been all leg work; no upper body strength training for a very long time!

Now let’s talk about you! One of my first thoughts, believe it or not, was how on earth I’m going to get the podcast out. Amongst the first people I notified were the emergency response team of Jill from the Northwoods, Allister Jenks, and Bart Busschots.

Jill said since she most recently produced the show, she could be standing by, Allister offered content, and Bart was ready to record a solo Security Bits since this was our weekend.

I don’t know what’s going to happen in the coming weeks, as I’ll be shuffled off to a rehab center, possibly as early as Sunday. I have been assured by the Slack community that recordings will be coming in to keep the show alive so that even with this catastrophic failure of your host, we won’t lose our 20+ year streak of never missing an episode of the NosillaCast.

I’ll end this installment of what I suspect will be an ongoing saga with a comedy bit by Brian Regan. In this video the tells the story of how he has such severe intestinal issues that he drives himself to the emergency room. The whole bit is hilarious, but I’ve queued the video to when the nurse asks him to rate his pain. In this part, he talks about how a broken femur bone is the most painful thing you can have.