Remembering the fall in the fall

I’m fast coming up on the 19th anniversary of my fall — the fall in the fall.

Time really does move fast. So does gravity.

In movies and on TV, when someone falls from a height, the camera often switches to slow-motion mode, and the faller seems almost to float downward.

Nope.

On Saturday, Oct. 3, at 10:30 a.m., paint brush in hand, I was on an extension ladder whose feet rested on the flat front porch roof of our house, leaned against the edge of the slanted third-floor roof. The three dormer windows that protrude from the front of the third-floor roof, exiting from the attic, needed painting.

I had hung a gallon of white paint from one of the upper steps of the ladder, using a bent coat hanger. The bottom frame of the southernmost window was easily within reach, and I had painted it quickly.

But the side panels of the window stretched above me. I saw I would have to climb higher (vertically challenged as I am).

I did so, and absent-mindedly put my foot above the pivot point where the ladder rested on the roof edge.

That step, of course, forced the ladder’s feet out and down, sliding off the edge of the porch roof. I followed immediately, bouncing first off the roof, with the paint splattering the roof, the ladder and the ground.

It happened so fast I didn’t have time to plan how I would land on the lawn below. But it did flash across my mind that if I stiffened up I would probably break my back, neck, or worse.

So as I bounced, I let myself go limp and waited. That threw my center of gravity onto my back, and that’s how I landed on the lawn, arms and legs above me.

Kathy, in the house, heard the ladder clang and the thuds of my two-stop trip. She knew immediately what had happened, and rushed out the front door and down the steps.

By then I had moved all my limbs and my neck, and knew I would be OK. So when Kathy shouted, “Are you all right?”, I responded, “Does this mean I don’t have to go to Charity Ball?” (I’m not a dancing fan, and not very good at it.)

The woman who lived across the street hurried over to help, giving Kathy time to call 911. By the time the ambulance arrived, my back was giving me some pain, which I told the EMTs about, and I tried to roll to the side to take the pressure off.

They told me not to move. Everyone was looking at my left ankle. I felt no pain there, but my foot stuck out at an awkward angle. As it turned out, the ankle had been twisted beneath the ladder when it hit the roof.

The ankle bone was shattered.

After a quick stop for analysis at Greene County Medical Center, it was off to Ames by ambulance for surgery.

(The fall also compressed two of my vertebrae, so I’m now half an inch shorter than before. I really couldn’t spare the half inch.)

Three of my close friends, after each had committed an unpardonable sin during a home improvement project, had organized an exclusive club named Handyman’s Anonymous. The requirement for a member was to phone the others whenever he was tempted to do something useful around the house, and they were to talk him out of it.

(One had tipped over on his riding mower and broken his leg, another had broken a toilet bowl trying to change the seat, and the third had broken a bed frame by overtightening the bolts.)

In the ambulance on the way to Ames, I called one of the three charter members and described my incident, asking if it would qualify me as a member. He agreed it would.

In Ames, the surgeon rebuilt my ankle, holding it together with 11 screws and a plate. Nothing was done about my vertebrae, but the back pain they caused ended relatively soon, as the doctors knew it would.

After about 1½ years, the metal in the ankle started to cause me some discomfort, so on a return trip to Ames it was removed. All that remains from the entire ordeal is a little arthritis in my ankle.

The Bee and Herald staff rose to the occasion professionally, turning out newspapers with no problem in my absence of three months.

My accident occurred the morning of the day when Iowa was playing Ohio State in football. I had been hurrying to get done so I could watch the game on TV.

The B&H news and feature writer did a short story the next Thursday with the following headline: “Morain, Hawks both fall on Saturday.”

I spent a few days in the Ames hospital for post-surgery recovery, then returned to Jefferson for a week of recuperation at the hospital here. As I was being released from the Ames hospital, Kathy noticed that my record sheet marked me down as a “DNR.”

For outdoor sports enthusiasts, those initials stand for the Department of Natural Resources.

But for Kathy, as a medical social worker, and for hospitals, they mean “Do Not Resuscitate.” In other words, if the patient expires at the hospital, no attempt is to be made to save his life.

Kathy, after her initial shock, tracked down the reason I was a DNR: the hospital staff in Ames had mistakenly pulled my dad’s records instead of mine — he was also Frederick Morain from Jefferson.

I laughed about it. Kathy didn’t.

The dormer window still needs paint.