First of all all parties are fine.
I was in the house working on a web page and Terri was outside working on the garage, and I heard this loud CRASH. Shit. I grab the wired phone that happens to be beside the door and run outside. I grabbed that phone so I could call 911 and they would know exactly where I was without having to explain much. My criteria for whether to call was: is she on the ground. She was, so I dialed as I ran up to her. 911 and I reach her at the exact same time and she's got dirt all over her and telling me she's ok. Not yet believing her, I tell 911 that my wife has just fallen off a ladder (turns out she was climbing over the short fence and her foot caught. "Do you need medical attention?" I relay that. Terri tells me: "No, it's just my knee." This time I mostly believe her as I've had a chance to see she's not bleeding. I tell her and the operator that I'll take her to Kaiser and grateful that she wasn't hurt worse, rang off from 911.
She tries to get up, I tell her not to move. She says something like: "No really I'm ok." and I tell her to stay still, she asks something very much like "Why?" and I respond mostly because it's still novel to me "Because I'm your wife. Stay still." To my somewhat surprise, she actually relented momentarily. She had bashed her knee quite nicely, and it was swelling fast so we decide that we need to get her pants off and she says that she really would much rather do that in the house. She's not dying, and we have a little time so I agree. The shortest way in is via the back door and that's locked, so I leave her a second and go in the side door and out the back door so that it's open and unlocked. She's standing up, I indicate in some fashion that I'm a little less than thrilled about this, but she's then uses it to say that she's not dead yet. I open the fence (which is what she should have done in the first place, but we often don't bother since it's a Corgi sized fence which is actually a modified trellis turned sideways and with extra slats added), and I help her up the steps and get to the bedroom where she can take the pants off and we can get a good look at balloon knee. Then get her to lay down on the hide-a-bed, elevate it and I put an ice pack on it and hand her the phone to call Kaiser to ask what to do next.
After asking questions about what happened and what the knee looks like, the Kaiser Nurse has her go through some basic self tests (for lack of a better phrase) and it appears that nothing needs to happen today (Sunday), but she should consider coming in on Monday. Despite her blood pressure medication frowning on it, she was ok'd to take anti-inflamatories (in the non-prescription realm we had Aleve and Ascriptin - she chose Aleve).
While this is proceeding Trek is being very clingy and concerned looking. It's all very sweet until I realize that it's 5:30pm and all she wants is dinner and Terri usually does their meals, so it was more worry about the food dispenser being broken. I fed them and the dogs went away for a little while, but to their credit they did reappear.
I have a trekking pole with a right angle grip that with a tip added doubles very nicely as a really cool cane (I found this out after opening my knee up on Mt Tam some while back), so I dug it out and adjusted it for her (another thing that makes it a really cool cane - much lighter than a cane too). So now she's hobbling around and scaring the dogs and in general doing ok though I have yet to find out how she's getting to Kaiser or if I'm driving her there.
I'm just glad she didn't fall off a ladder as part of the project she's working on does require being on a ladder part of the time.
Update: her knee is looking better and she's delaying going to Kaiser until the swelling goes down so they can evaluate it.
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