Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Seasonal trauma

News to me. Our chief of surgery notes an interesting "blip" in a certain kind of accidents during this fall season: Broken feet from people falling off a ladder while cleaning out the leaves from their clogged roof gutters. He recently moved to Boston from the Midwest and said it was common there, too.

Have others noticed this?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

In a related incidence, my nephew fell off the monkey bars at his school a few weeks back and broke his arm. The surgeon at Children's Healthcare (here in Atlanta) said that were it not for monkey bars, they'd "be out of business" with broken arm repairs.

Since then, we've learned another child at his school broke her arm the same way the same day. And one has occurred every week at the school since. As we've asked around, we're learning this is true of nearly every school in our area. Scary!

You've convinced me to hire someone for my gutters. "A penny wise, a pound foolish." Thanks.

Anonymous said...

took care of a patient yesterday with this exact story.....he is so bummed

Karli Del Biondo said...

Thanks for the reminder! I am getting up on the ladder this weekend again to get the last of the fall leaves out of the gutters. My husband is too afraid to get on the ladder, so I do this chore! Thanks for stopping by my blog. Karli

Anonymous said...

This is the new chief of surgery? What happened to the old chief of surgery?

Anonymous said...

We'll see the Christmas-light injuries soon.

Most ERs have a number of injury patterns that they recognize. Around here we have the ice-storm victims, race weekend at the local motocross track, etc.