Bedroom is a dangerous place
THREE weeks on, everybody is getting tired of hearing about my wrist injury.
It’s not news now, if it ever was.
I can understand how they feel. I am getting pretty sick of it myself.
And, as the actual event fades into sheetchanging history, I have been scouting around for someone or something to blame.
Maybe I am channelling Boris. I am unwilling to be held accountable for my own folly.
Or closer to home, could I be imitating those farmers who seem unwilling to recognise the full impact of their practices on New Zealand’s fresh water? Oh, the drama of Federated Farmers saying the Government’s freshwater proposals will essentially throw farming under the tractor.
They estimate that large parts of rural New Zealand will have to abandon their reliance on the pastoral sector and that there could be wholesale land use change to meet unnecessarily stringent targets.
It is hard to be sympathetic to them. They say they want
regulation based on science and evidence, but many farmers have been oblivious to the ongoing stupidity and environmental vandalism of dairy farming on soils which were never suited to it.
We need fewer cows and the sooner the sector gets that message the better. Freshwater ecologist Mike Joy has previously pointed to studies showing significant stock reductions can increase profits because expenditure is lower.
He wisely said that the key to progressing in the right direction is ‘‘keeping people with vested interests as far away as possible from decisionmaking positions; thinking longterm; and, finally, choosing the change that maximises multiple gains by ensuring problems are not considered in isolation’’.
It remains to be seen if the Government will hold its nerve on the proposals in its discussion document or water it down (see what I am doing there?) when the rural PR machine whirrs into action.
The spin will be that farmers are already doing everything possible to clean up our rivers and that we cannot ask them to do anything more effective because it will be the end of life as we know it and the decrease in food production will mean we will also probably all starve to death.
In the meantime, I’ve got my own PR to worry about. I have been looking at the evidence. I might want to believe I am special, but the ACC statistics on bedroom injuries suggest that’s not the case.
Nudge and wink all you like, but it is time we all realised the bedroom is a dangerous place.
I only wish I had told the offspring more about that. (Instead, in their teenage years, I kept embarrassing them by threatening to have a supply of condoms in the bathroom which I promised I would not count daily.)
After doing a search of its database, using the words bed, bed post, pillow, duvet, blanket and mattress, ACC told me that in the past financial year it spent $35,386,764 on bedroomrelated claims (not including Emergency Department costs which ACC bulkfunds).
This amount covered 38,010 new claims, plus money still being spent on a couple of thousand already in the system.
Annual spending on such claims has risen by almost
$10 million in the past five years. In Otago we had almost 2000 new claims last year. Numbers have been rising in the past five years here, from 1733 in 201415.
The most common activity leading up to an accident nationally is getting on/off/in or out of bed (where the activity is specified — no nudging or winking, please).
This is followed by situations in which beds are being moved, then walking and running, then children playing.
The top cause for the bedroom accidents has consistently been losing balance/personal contribution. That, or tripping/ stumbling at number five would cover the idiocy of my tumble in the bedding when changing my sheets. Number nine on the list is puncture — please, let that be related to water or air beds and nothing to do with blowup dolls. Being struck by a person or an animal is number 10, resulting in 813 claims last year.
A wrist break does not feature in the top 10 primary injuries caused by these accidents. No surprises (and no nudging or winking) that lumbar sprains were consistently the most common (5422 last year) followed by neck sprains (3191).
I have helpfully conducted my own analysis of my accident (real scientists, look away now) and concluded it was an interior decorating problem.
If I’d had a carpeted floor rather than a chipboard one, and trendily had six million (slight exaggeration) pillows which had to be tossed on to the floor during sheet changing, I could have landed safely, if not sexily.
It’s a pity hindsight’s not as good as foresight, in falling or farming.