Why I joined PinkSteady

Three people I love have fallen, my mom, my dad, and my father-in-law.

Mom fell in the backyard reaching a little farther than she should have. She lost her balance, fell, and fractured her hip. The road to recovery was a long one, but at least now she is able to get around with her walker. Mom has always been the kind of person who would give the coat off her own back to help somebody else.

Next was my father-in-law. He has always been a big, strong, independent man, and he spent a lot of time on the road, whether he was driving a big rig truck or out on his motorcycle. One day he came in from the garage, tripped, and fell in the hallway. We live a little over an hour away, so by the time we got there he had already been taken by ambulance to the hospital. His recovery was complicated by other issues that came up during the treatment for his hip replacement, and he lost a lot of muscle and confidence after the fall.

I have written about this on LinkedIn before, but Dad came out to visit and we hiked up to a waterfall in Yosemite. Dad has always been in surprisingly good shape. He is 93 now. Not long after that visit, he had a couple of falls. Luckily for him, he did not break anything, though he did fall and hit his head one time, with no major injuries. He walks with a cane now because he has a hard time lifting his feet up high enough, and he does not feel confident walking without it.

These were three very different falls, but each one of them changed something. A fall doesn't only hurt the person who falls. It changes how their family answers the phone at night, and it shrinks the rooms they're willing to move through. The first fall isn't usually the worst injury. It's often the moment when someone starts to make their world smaller on purpose, when the garden gets harder, the grocery store gets farther, and the stairs become a negotiation.

What I've learned, watching it happen three times, is that the fall is rarely a surprise to the people around them. There are warning signs every time, things like a reach for a counter that wasn't there a year ago, or a pause at the curb, or a new caution that wasn't there a few months before. We saw it every time, but we just didn't have a way to name it, measure it, or do anything with it before a fall actually arrived.

That's why I joined PinkSteady.

PinkSteady isn't a medical device, and I'm careful about that. It won't diagnose anyone, and it won't catch a trip in progress. What it does do is give the people I love, and the people who love them, something we never had, which is a way to notice the shift early. It's a score that moves week to week, a trend that a daughter can see from another state, a conversation that starts before the fall instead of after it.

I can't go back and give my mom, my dad, or my father-in-law the version of this that didn't exist when they needed it. None of us can do that. But we can build it for someone else's parents, and that is why I'm here.

Respectfully,

Jim