Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Too funny not to share...

I've had a treadmill for years. I haven't used it for a LONG time! Naomi kind of makes it impossible. I had it in the living room at one time and did well. I could walk and watch TV. When it got shoved to the back room it just seemed like 15 minutes on that thing was 5 hours! I'd much rather go walk outside.
Since my dad has been on chemo it hasn't hurt his appetite one bit! It has made him less active and the last couple times he's had blood drawn his sugar has been up. He asked if I wanted to sell the treadmill. That's my dad! He would have given me exactly what I paid for it all those years ago! He's very generous. I told him no, but we'd move it to their house and he could use it indefinitely.
So one weekend Bill loaded it up. He set it up for Dad and it was actually getting used every day.
My Mom has type 2 diabetes and she even started walking regularly. When Isaiah is down there on the weekend even he would use it! Last weekend he was putting toy cars on it. So Tuesday evening my mom decides to use it. She turned it on and then turned out the lights in the room because she was in her nightie and didn't want people driving up the alley beside the house to see her in there walking.
So, she's walking and thinks "boy, this is really set at a steep incline". So she decides in the dark to start pushing buttons to lower the incline and pushes something that makes it speed up. Faster and faster. She's running trying to keep up but at some point realized that she couldn't and she was going to fall off. Well, get thrown off is more like it. She got thrown into the wall behind the treadmill. Crumpled into a ball. Hit her chin on the "tread" part and her chin is all skinned up. Hurt her ribs She said she lay there thinking "how do I get up and how do I stop this". She worked her way up, turned on the light and turned off the treadmill.
Meanwhile dad's in the living room sitting in his recliner completely oblivious to her distress. There's an old dry sink in the room and she said the treadmill was going so fast you could hear the china clinking into each other.
Now, here is why this is so pathetic! So very pathetic! The treadmill uses a magnet as a key. You are supposed to clip one end on your clothing and the other end holds the magnet. So if something like this happens it automatically would disengage the key and stop almost immediately. I asked her about it and she said she had the clip end wound around the bar on the treadmill. So why didn't you just reach out and pull the magnet off yourself when you realized it was speeding up, I asked. She didn't think of that! She said she thought she was Jesse Owens there for a minute.

1 comment:

SuzanSayz said...

Quite a few years ago that happened to me at the Courtclub we are members of.
I won't go into the embarrassing detail. But suffice it to say that the lights were most definitely NOT off, and the room was far from empty.
To give you an idea of how bad it was, my pants were actually in danger of being PULLED OFF!
Enough details.