I find it very sad that in all of 2022 I wrote exactly seven posts

I won't give you the standard 'I want to make 2023 better in terms of this blog'. You know the spiel. What I'm going to do instead is write. I am 55 years old. Mature, middle-aged even, but not really old. But I felt old this week due to finally making the decision to buy a cane. I have very bad knees (I have since high school, actually) and need a knee replacement but have about 50 more pounds to lose before they'll do it (I've lost 50 already since November 2021). But more importantly, my balance is really off. I've fallen three times in the past year, two on ice, so maybe they don't count, and once off a Lextran bus servicing the University of Kentucky. But a lot of the time I'll be standing on a completely solid, even surface, and if I turn my head at all or move a bit, or just stand completely still, I will start to fall over. Put me on an elevator and it's worse. So...I ordered a quad cane from Amazon using my flexible spending account. It's not aluminium, it's steel, all of two pounds, which several reviewers complained was too heavy (it took me a couple of days to get used to it, but I get that an older or less strong--and while I'm pathetic in terms of strength, I'm better than some). It can handle someone who's 500 lbs, which I'm not, of course, but I did need one above the standard ones that bear up to 200 or 250 lbs, as I'm about 30 lbs over. So I wanted to make sure it was sturdy enough.

Behold!



I've used it for a couple of days now. The first thing I did the night it came was to watch YouTube videos on adjusting, walking, and dealing with stairs while using a cane. The next day, I went to work with it and definitely made sure I took it to our physical therapy department to make sure all was well. I'd changed the height that morning, and gotten it right (it was a little too short). The cane should come up to your wrist. On a quad cane, there are four legs on the end, not one, and usually (as in mine) the inner ones are aligned narrower than the outer ones, so that shows the orientation that should be used, and if it has a curved section, it should face curving to the front, not towards you. You use it by the opposite leg from your weak one. My left knee is worse, for example, so I use it on my right, but bring it forward when I step forward with the left for greater stability. Lastly, you go upstairs with the good foot and downstairs with the bad one, and the PT secretary actually helped me remember this by saying, 'I always think of heaven and hell', so the good ones go up, the bad ones go down, and that mnemonic has done more for me than anything else.

What I have discovered is that it slows me down somewhat (I can walk smoothly with it, or at least did after I did a little experimenting), but that's good because I need to slow down due to my loss of balance, as I usually fall when I'm rushed.
One thing I discovered years ago when I broke my ankle after being hit by a car while crossing a busy street in a crosswalk (and with the light!) is that adaptive device like walkers, canes, and wheelchairs are a boon because they help maintain or increase mobility.  I initially felt bad about being on a walker and in a wheelchair then, but it helped so much.
This seems to be much the same thing.

Anyway, I'm going to try to embrace this and remind myself that people of all ages use canes, crutches, walkers, etc
This is a step up from my hiking poles, I guess.

But it will help me a lot in the long run.  I still feel a bit decrepit though, and I hate that feeling, but this will help me by preventing dangerous falls, I'm sure.

It also means that the bus drivers tend to remember to kneel the bus (the bus incident involved me coming down from a greater height on the step off the bus because the driver had not lowered that side of the bus, which they call kneeling), as they recognise I'm having some difficulty.
This, along with getting ADA [i.e., handicapped] parking this summer, including a general placard and a university hangtag, has really helped, along with riding the Lextran buses at UK, which kneel and are easier to navigate than the UK-run buses [almost all of which have stairs at the entry; the Lextran buses only have stairs if you go all the way to the back of the bus].

Also, the Lextran bus route takes me right across the street from the medical centre I work in, rather than being dropped off at the UK hospital employee entrance by the emergency department and walking all around the ambulance bays and the hospital itself, which is difficult for me. So it's a win. I park in the Blue 'K' lot near the stadium, and it takes me about 5-7 minutes to get from there to work once the bus comes.
The Orange buses that UK runs at the healthcare lot run more often, but they took about 10 minutes to do their route to my stop and then I took 7-10 more minutes to walk around the hospital slowly and get to my workplace.

I just wish I'd figured this out three years before when I struggled with those staired buses for all that time.

I found this article interesting

UNFIT FOR WORK: The startling rise of disability in America

In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job, and new laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled. Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government.

The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined. Yet people relying on disability payments are often overlooked in discussions of the social safety net. People on federal disability do not work. Yet because they are not technically part of the labor force, they are not counted among the unemployed.

In other words, people on disability don't show up in any of the places we usually look to see how the economy is doing. But the story of these programs -- who goes on them, and why, and what happens after that -- is, to a large extent, the story of the U.S. economy. It's the story not only of an aging workforce, but also of a hidden, increasingly expensive safety net.

For the past six months, I've been reporting on the growth of federal disability programs. I've been trying to understand what disability means for American workers, and, more broadly, what it means for poor people in America nearly 20 years after we ended welfare as we knew it. Here's what I found.

I know several people on disability, all legitimately so, and who had to work very hard to get certified as disabled by the government. It's a long and frustrating process, and then often you're stuck without access to Medicare for a long time after you finally start getting those other benefits, and it's crazy. I sometimes think they make it so hard that you're just likely to give up and die. But for other people, it's relatively easy to get on disability, even if they could work in other areas--and this is the kicker--if they had other job skills. That's what this article looks at, the use of disability as a safety net for workers no longer relevant in the workforce, who do not have the education or opportunity to get jobs that would allow them to work with whatever physical or mental ailments they might have, and a system that is designed to perpetuate the problems inherent in the system. It's an interesting read.

Sad, and preventable

But here's something I didn't know:

Davis reiterated that the Lexington Division of Fire will provide and install a smoke detector to anyone who wants one. "All they need to do is call 311 and tell them they need to talk to the fire department about a smoke detector, and we'll come out and put it in," Davis said.

Coroner identifies 3 killed in Lexington house fire; cause determined

The cause of the fire were smoking materials discarded into a plastic trash can. The elderly couple used oxygen; their son was in a wheelchair. None of them made it out, although they tried, and there was no evidence of a smoke detector in their house.

In this season of Christmas lights, space heaters, woodburning stoves, and the like, please remember that fire safety is of great concern. I work for an institution that cares for children who have been burned as well as the orthopaedic issues my hospital deals with. Please be careful with ashes and cigarettes. Please be careful when using oxygen. And please have a working smoke detector (with battery installed) in your home, or more if you have a large home. A carbon monoxide detector wouldn't be bad if you have a gas home, either.

It also shows that if you have a disability you need a fire plan just as much or more so than someone who doesn't. I've had to rethink things around my house while I've been off with my injury. I am careful to leave a clear path out of the apartment when I sleep. And I do check my smoke detector occasionally to make sure it is still working and keep a fire extinguisher in the apartment. Hopefully I won't actually need them, but, they're there if I do.