Be Alarmed!

by Bob Buddemeier

Not long ago, I had some replacement body parts installed. As often happens, this was followed by a modest procession of helpers to supervise the breaking-in period.  One of these, the instigator of this story, was a nurse and self-proclaimed safety advocate.

“When was the last time you fell?” she asked, which many people in the health professions seem to feel is the most appropriate gambit for starting a conversation with an older person.  Well, if we discount that very minor episode involving the cat’s leash, it has been quite a long time.  When so informed, she persisted “What would you do if you fell and [more ominously] couldn’t get up?”

“I’d crawl or roll to the bathroom and reach up for the string on the alarm switch,” I said.  As you probably can guess by now, she had a story of a client whose hip was so badly shattered that she couldn’t even crawl.  She followed up with, “You should have a fully charged cell phone with you at all times.”

That gave me an opening to regain a little ground in the game of Disability Chess.  “You mean when I get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom half-asleep in the dark I need to have a cell phone in the pocket of my jammies, and be able to get it out and turn it on and dial something?  I can barely do that in the daytime when I haven’t fallen.”

She fell back tactically, but continued to hammer away on the strategic point of having emergency notification capability readily at hand.  Which I admit is not a bad idea, even if it did start off as somebody else’s.  So I made conciliatory noises, and when she left, swung into action.

If you go onto MyRVM a-a-a-all the way over to the far right of the menus bar (Emergency Preparedness), open that page, and then scroll about half-way down the right side, you come to Emergency Pendants.  I called in a work order for one.  The next day Rick Ramirez showed up with two options, neither of which looked like the pictures on MyRVM.

One option was a necklace with TWO pendants – an old-fashioned push-the-button one and some sort of new-fangled accelerometer that detects when you are falling.  I reflected on how much fun it would be to wear that to bed and tangle it up with my CPAP fittings, and quickly decided on the bracelet.  Two days later Rick was back with the bracelet – a demo, a test, and bingo, I’m one button press away from safety, for fifty-ish dollars.  If my left arm is not broken too badly to push on the bracelet.  I guess there’s always some loophole.

Where does it work?  On campus, but not in the gardens or on the golf course.  If you’re at home it knows exactly where you are, but if you’re out among the cottages and hit the mayday button, you get triangulated by sensors that are about on every third building, and should be able to place you within a quarter-block or so.

PS-1:  The Revenge of the Pendant – Rick told me to just throw my original necklace pendant in the trash when I found it.  I did, on Monday, and early Tuesday morning got a call from Jens Larsen about an emergency signal from my cottage.  No explanation, until I realized that this was about the time when the garbage truck was compacting the trash in my area.  A technological death rattle.

PS-2:  Don’t believe everything you read – MyRVM says the bracelet is waterproof; Rick says water resistant, not waterproof (= shower but not pool).  Worth paying attention to, since I suspect that the only way to tell if it has drowned is to press the button without a result.