Some guys have all the luck

I know, I know: I promised that my third column about breaking my hip and the tortuous recovery would be the last I would inflict upon you. But that was before I learned that more people have died in the United States of complications of hip fractures in the past four years than have died of Covid.

Let’s get to the good part first.

I had not stepped outside for six weeks, apart from my darling sister ferrying me to doctor appointments. And when you’re riding shotgun in a car, you’re not really out of doors, even with the window open, sniffing the breeze.

Then one day last week I awoke and recalled the words of my dear departed mother, a child of the Depression: “You don’t have it so bad, Buster.”

Mom was right, as usual.

So I grabbed my walker and strode manfully toward the back porch, carrying Shakespeare in a bag.

I had avoided this trek for weeks because first, ouch, and then the three steps, with the right-angle turn. Then the garden hoses.

This accomplished, I fell back into a recliner and opened the Works to my preferred soliloquy, Richard II, V, v:

“I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world;
And, for because the world is populous
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer’t out.”

Having reached the apotheosis:

“… But whate’er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased
With being nothing.”

I closed the book, lay back, and looked up through the leaves and branches of my old ash tree, lit from beneath by the rising sun. And in that moment, broken hip, unremitting pain and all, I thought: “What could be better than this?”

The green leaves and yellow seed pods glowed at dawn. Studying that tree — if you can call that studying — I thought: “OK, green is yellow plus blue, but how do green + yellow = that blue sky?”

Then the smell of rain.

Man.

Depressive sorts may skip the rest of this column.

Five percent of all deaths in the United States are associated with hip fractures, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Nature magazine found a 25 percent mortality rate in the three months after a hip fracture.

The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine reported the same mortality rate, one in four, though its time frame was one year. Many of these deaths were a result of complications of surgery. And surgery — trust me on this — is necessary after a hip fracture.

In a meta-study of 11 other studies, the National Center for Biotechnology Information found the mortality rate within a year of suffering a hip fracture to be between 14% and 58% — such a wide variance that I find it practically useless; though the low range of 14% comes to one in seven people.

One in three women and one in 12 men will suffer a hip fracture at some time, according to the National Institutes of Health; 86% of hip fractures occur in people 65 years old and older.

Forty percent of hip fracture sufferers are unable to walk after a year, according to Johns Hopkins.

Several reliable sources report that 350,000 people in the United States fracture a hip every year: the same number who died of Covid-19 in 2020, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. That’s 959 people a day — 40 people an hour, a hip fracture every one and a half minutes.

(For the record, the Covid death toll rose to 460,000 in 2021, according to the CDC — the third-leading cause of death after cancer and heart disease that year. But the Covid death toll declined to 244,000 in 2022, the CDC reported, placing its death toll far behind the 350,000 associated with hip fractures. By 2023, the Covid death toll had declined to about 70,000.)

With a U.S. population of 62 million people 65 years old and older, one in 177 old-timers like me — 367,000 old men and women — will suffer a hip fracture this year. Good luck, pals. I hope you make it through the first six weeks. They’re the worst.

If you make it: How about that smell of rain? Did you know that it makes the birds sing?

Can I prove it? No. Do I have to?

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