The Fall Is Not the Event. The Fall Is the Ending.
Why the walking stick standing unused in the corner is the most expensive object in the house. Ask an orthopaedic surgeon what a fall costs and they will tell you about the hip. A fractured neck of femur in a 75-year-old is not a broken bone in the way a broken bone is ordinarily understood. It is a hinge event. The surgery is significant. The recovery involves weeks of immobility, and immobility in an older body is corrosive — muscle mass falls away, lungs congest, pressure sores form, confusion sets in. The literature on one-year mortality after hip fracture in the elderly makes for genuinely sobering reading; the figures vary by study and setting, but they are consistently, unambiguously bad. And of those who survive, a large proportion never return to the level of independence they had the day before they fell. One slip. One wet floor. One rug that moved. Except it wasn't one slip. That is the thing families almost universally get wrong. The fall is the last chapt...
