I had a really bad fall today. I was just so tired today (due to losing sleep last night) but I went out to do some errands, and I tripped when I was getting off the bus and slammed really hard into a brick wall. I'm so glad my head didn't get hurt. Initially I felt so much pain in my right lower ribs that I was screaming for a while, about 40 seconds or so, maybe longer. Some strangers came to help and offered to call 911 but I managed to ask them not to after a minute, cause I thought I'd wait to see if the pain would subside or not. Thank God, the pain in my ribs subsided fairly quickly, after just a few minutes. Those strangers were very kind, but I'm glad they didn't call an ambulance just like that (lol).
A couple hours later, now, I feel just a tiny bit of pain there when I breathe in strongly, but nothing to note of really when I feel around. But I think there was a slam on my upper breast — that is more painful when I breathe in but only then, and I think it's just the breast tissue. Although even as I write this it's subsiding so much. It's in my breast, not a bone, where I feel that.
The most severe injury though, was my right shoulder — specifically it's the anterior and lateral deltoid. After a minute or two I noticed my shoulder was in pretty bad pain but it felt like just a muscular injury to me. Increasingly it started hurting so much more and then the pain levelled out, and I still felt it was just muscular. When I move that arm forward and to the side it causes the pain. Within under an hour I was home with ice on the shoulder. I just finished ice on it for about 40 minutes and it does feel so much better now. I see no bruise or swelling there yet.
Also I hurt the pad of my right hand and that still hurts when I rotate my thumb around, but it's not that bad and the pain is subsiding gradually. There is a bit of noticeable swelling and near-bruising on the hand pad.
And I have a large scrape on my knee, but it's not bleeding. I put polysporin and a bandaid on the knee scrape after washing it with soap
About the deltoid injury, here's what ChatGPT had to say :
With the kind of impact you described, a deltoid contusion (deep muscle bruise) or strain is quite plausible. Those fibers are heavily involved when you lift the arm forward or out to the side, so an injury there would naturally hurt when you move the arm.
The fact that ice already produced a substantial improvement within the first hour is encouraging. It doesn't prove there's no deeper injury, but it's quite consistent with an acute soft-tissue injury.
Over the next day or two, you may notice tenderness, stiffness, swelling or bruising developing there — the visible bruise can actually appear later rather than immediately. I'd continue the shorter 15–20-minute ice sessions tonight and avoid lifting anything substantial with that arm.
One useful thing tomorrow is simply to see what your arm can comfortably do. If you retain a reasonable range of motion and it's gradually becoming easier, that supports a relatively straightforward soft-tissue injury. If instead you cannot raise the arm, develop pronounced weakness rather than just pain, get significant swelling/deformity, numbness/tingling, or develop very focal bone pain, I'd have the shoulder examined.
Given how violent the initial impact was, though, being left mainly with localized deltoid pain that already responds strongly to ice is a much nicer trajectory than the first 40 seconds of the accident suggested. ❤️
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