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Overcrowded hospitals also dealing with injuries from ice
Slips and falls are common during the winter, but this year, it’s contributing to the overloading of hospitals.
MINNEAPOLIS — It’s that time of year again when you’ve got to watch your step.
HCMC in downtown Minneapolis is among the many facilities seeing their usual increase in slip-and-fall injuries, due to the snowy and icy winter conditions. Dr. Stephen Smith, an emergency physician with Hennepin Healthcare, said these patients have flooded into the Emergency Department for roughly the past month.
“Lots of fractures. Lots of wrist fractures, especially. Ankle fractures. People fall and hit their head,” Smith said. “Falls, in general, even without the ice, are one of the most common things we see.”
In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 800,000 patients are hospitalized every year because of falls, often impacting older people. Falls are also the most common cause of traumatic brain injuries.
“And when ice season comes, it’s that much more likely to happen,” Smith said. “even among young healthy people.”
It’s certainly nothing new for emergency departments to see more people slipping and falling during the winter season.
However, this year, Smith said these injuries are adding to an already extreme workload, as hospitals across the country experience a crisis in capacity. As the pandemic and other seasonal illnesses continue to fill hospital beds, there are also widespread staffing shortages.
Just this week, a Hennepin Healthcare physician penned an Op-Ed in the Star Tribune, titled: “On health care front lines, we are not OK.”
“The entire country is overloaded with emergency medicine patients. Many acute care nurses quit the job during COVID. Hospitals can’t discharge patients to nursing homes because the nursing homes are full, the group homes are full, psychiatry inpatient is full, and the hospitals can’t discharge patients. We can’t get patients upstairs, so our ED is full of patients who need to be admitted,” Smith said. “And this is true for every department across the cities and the country. It’s a national problem.”
Smith said that HCMC has had to turn down some transfer patients from other hospitals – transfers they would normally accommodate, if not for capacity shortages.
“And now we have all these people slipping and falling,” Smith said, “and that just adds to the overcrowding.”
Smith offered a few suggestions to avoid falls: Outfit your shoes with traction cleats like Yaktrax, clear your walks and driveway, and add strength exercises to your routine to improve your balance.
Hennepin Healthcare also published this guide in December about how to “walk like a penguin” in icy conditions.
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The crash happened when a Suburban pulling a trailer failed to stop at a stop sign, Minnesota State Patrol said.
WAUKENABO, Minn. — Two people from Minnetonka died in a crash Friday in Aitkin County while others, including children, were hurt.
According to Minnesota State Patrol, it happened at the intersection of Highway 169 and Grove Street/County Road 3 in Waukenabo Township at approximately 5:15 p.m.
A Suburban pulling a trailer was driving east on County Road 3 but did not stop at the stop sign at Highway 169, authorities said. The vehicle was struck by a northbound GMC Yukon. Two other vehicles were struck in the crash, but the people in those two cars were not injured.
In the Suburban, the driver sustained life-threatening injuries, according to State Patrol. Elizabeth Jane Baldwin, 61, of Minnetonka, and Marlo Dean Baldwin, 92, of Minnetonka, both died. Officials said the driver of the vehicle, a 61-year-old from Minnetonka, has life-threatening injuries.
There were six people in the Yukon when the crash occurred. The 44-year-old driver, as well as passengers ages 18, 14, and 11, sustained what officials described as life-threatening injuries. The other two passengers have non-life-threatening injuries.
Alcohol is not believed to be a factor in the crash, but officials said Elizabeth Jane Baldwin had not been wearing a seatbelt.
Among those at the start line this year will be Alex Vigil.
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Pixar’s second installment of the movie features characters we’ve already met — Joy, Sadness and Anger — and gives them a new roommate named Anxiety.
MINNEAPOLIS — Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” universe plays out inside the mind of the movie’s adolescent protagonist, Riley.
She plays a kid from Minnesota whose family uproots her life by moving to San Francisco. But did you know that what plays out in Riley’s mind actually comes from the mind of a real-life Minnesotan?
“You are one of us!” said Breaking the News anchor Jana Shortal.
“Yes, I am!” said Burnsville native and the movie’s creator and director, Kelsey Mann.
Mann was chosen for the role by ANOTHER Minnesotan — Pete Docter, the man behind the original movie, “Inside Out.”
“I don’t know if Pete asked me to do this movie because I was from Minnesota and he was from Minnesota … I just think it worked out that way,” Mann said.
How two guys from the south metro made a pair of Pixar movies that would change the game is a hell of a story that began with Docter in 2015.
“He [Docter] was just trying to tell a fun story — an emotional, fun story — and didn’t realize how much it would help give kids a vocabulary to talk about things they were feeling because they are feeling those emotions, but they’re really hard to talk about,” Mann said.
Some parents, counselors and teachers might even tell you it did more good for kids than just entertain them. It unlocked their emotions and begged for what Mann set out to create at the beginning of 2020.
“That part was fun, particularly fun,” he said. “I think the daunting part was following up a film that everyone really loved.”
But Mann knew what he wanted to do with the movie’s follow-up, “Inside Out 2.”
“Diving into Riley’s adolescence … that was just fun,” he said.
This time around, Riley is 13, hitting puberty and facing all of what, and who, comes with it. The franchise’s second installment features characters we’ve already met — Joy, Sadness and Anger — and gives them a new roommate named Anxiety.
“I think that’s what’s fun about the ‘Inside Out’ world: You can take something we all know and give it a face,” Mann said. “We can give anxiety a name and a face.”
The film follows Riley’s emotions fighting it out for control of her life. Joy wants Riley to stay young and hold on only to joy, while anxiety is hell-bent on taking over Riley over at the age of 13 because as a lot of us know, that’s when anxiety often moves in.
“I always pitched it as a takeover movie, like an emotional takeover,” Mann said. “Anxiety can kind of feel like that; it can take over and kind of shove your other emotions to the side and repress them.”
For a kids’ movie, it’s hard to watch this animation play out, even when an adult has the keys to decide.
“I’m making a movie about anxiety and I still have to remind myself to have my anxiety take a seat,” Mann said.
All of our individual anxieties have a place in this world.
“The whole movie honestly is about acceptance. Both acceptance of anxiety being there and also of your own flaws,” said Mann.
Even for our kids, we have to remember that this is life.
Anxiety will come for them; it does for us all.
The “Inside Out” world just shows them it’s so.
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