by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2015/07/01 15:04 +00:00, original URI: http://www.siao2.com/2015/07/01/8770668856267196613.aspx
Nothing really technical here today....
I'm not sure why I started counting the number of times I was falling, exactly.
It isn't like I hadn't been falling for years before that. Calling it a symptom of Asperger syndrome kinda misses the point, since my falls before September 11, 2001 were not any more or less memorable than the falls after. And it's not like there was a particular personal triggering event since at the time I was down in Los Angeles being dumped and not quite ready to travel up to San Jose for an Internationalization and Unicode conference, a conference that I missed due to being stranded in the wrong end of California with nothing to do but not be able to call anyone and watching the news from a hotel room.
But for whatever reason, some kind of internal counter of falls started on that day, and every once in awhile I would give the count of falls to that time. How many were related to spasticity due to multiple sclerosis or seizures secondary to multiple sclerosis, I suppose nobody can really say at this point, if indeed anyone ever could have. There is only two times that I know of that I was in danger of injuring myself by crossing the street post ictally, and just once that I know of where I suffered from post ictal confusion in front of anyone (by coincidence, it was my manager; I think he wrote it off as me being a bit odd. As I might've myself, though had I been a manager in such a situation I'd have been more conscientious about follow up, FWIW....
Eventually, I broke my hip, and then would forever remember that there had been 983 falls since 9/11. Fall number 984 caused a popping sound that felt kinda painful and was (apparently) a dislocation of the ball and socket joint of the left hip. Fall number 985 happened right after I tried to get up off the floor. And fall number 986 happened a few months later, when my iBOT 4000 was being repaired and I fell to the ground because my placement was not so good and the technician doing the repair couldn't pick me up comfortably and the fire department non-emergency response service was free and sympathetic to the situation once they were sure I wasn't injured by the fall.
So in the end I can claim truthfully that after 9/11 I fell 984 times without any real consequence, and the other two falls were related to my hip being broken. If I had been more clever, I would have realized that a quip about the thousand to one odds of there being a problem finally caught up to me, but at least I learned something out of it since there have been no falls,subsequently.
If only the lesson had been learned some time before or at the time of fall number 983.... :(