I got another message the other day from the assisted-living home where my mother is living, informing me that she had another extremely minor non-event sort of fall. I'm sort of used to that now, but the first time they called me and the woman described, at length and in detail, a very very minor fall that if it happened to me would almost not register as an event at all, I was waiting nervously for the actual news about what happened in the end. I mean, in my life, I have speed skating crashes involving fairly violent impacts into the pads after sliding across the path of some other guy with sharp blades on his feet, or tumbles down the hill in the snow while cross-country skiing, or occasional bike crashes (I've had a fall on ice that was much like the speed skating crashes, a long slide with no injury from the sliding because ice is slippery, but instead of other people on skates I was at risk of being hit by someone in a pickup truck) and trail running stumbles and even road running trips (probably the worst injury I've had in years was a trip while running on the road, which aside from the risk of being hit by someone making a left turn while eating a sandwich while on the phone, doesn't seem like an activity with a lot of crash hazard, but I tripped and fell at roughly 12km/hr and on pavement that can tear up the skin. I was actually bleeding a bit. But, again, not a real injury. Healed totally in weeks, at this point I couldn't even tell you which hand was scraped up, there's no hint left of any damage.) No one called my mother or my girlfriend to tell them what happened, because, hey, not a real injury (that speed skating crash above actually didn't even hurt at all, not even a minor bruise). The standards for what constitutes an incident than should be reported are evidently different at an assisted-living center than at an Olympic training facility, which I suppose is as it ought to be, but it's an adjustment. (At the oval we joke about the falls that look cool but don't hurt: "Only a physicist could fall like that!")
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