I've a friend who just broke her elbow. She's getting on in years- into the Silver category. Not aged enough for "Gold," which usually involves a leakage issue, but leakage depends on several things.
Aging leads to a life of being clunky. Gravity seems to be taking more interest in our limbs, often taking pot-shots from our formerly favorite pieces of furniture...
Take the hall tree, for example. They're deadly. Now some of you won't even know what I am talking about, but your hall tree is a wooden or metal instrument standing in your way, or about to fall over and pin you to the floor. I would know, they fall more regularly than vending machines...
....and we know just how deadly they are. Between 2008 and 2021, statistics indicate that 36,600 people went to the emergency room because of an accident related to a vending machine, most from a machine falling over on them. (National Electronic Injury Surveillance System statistics)
But back to the dreaded hall tree. According to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, 20-30 people die every year from falling furniture. And those are just the most unfortunate. Over 20,000 people are injured, on average, every year in an incident related to furniture. I was one of them back in February, when an industrial-age metal lampstand took my foot (and job) out of commission for weeks.
While I have searched for answers explaining why my older friends experience an increasingly sense of gravity's revenge, there seems to be no one in the medical profession who can make a positive correlation between a sense of increasing gravity and aging.
Frankly, I think we are just not there in science, nor medicine. We have no 21st century Newton, expanding our knowledge on the basics of living on a spinning blue planet. An 80's wall philosopher, feeling some angst, postulated it this way...."There is no gravity. The earth sucks."
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