Kevin Najera, 18, at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. He broke his ankle after falling on the ice. Anthony Lanzilote for The New York Times
Conditions in New York City are prime for the antics of Buster Keaton and other masters of the pratfall. But as any number of orthopedists and emergency room doctors in the city can attest, most people do not share Keaton’s grace.
Children run to school with no time to spare; women cannot bear to be seen without their favorite stiletto boots; pedestrians dash across the street against the light and their better judgment.
“I felt like someone made me do the splits,” Kevin Najera, 18, said Thursday, sitting in a wheelchair in the emergency room of Maimonides Medical Center in Borough Park, Brooklyn, with his backpack and one sneaker on his lap.
He had overslept and had run to school, slipping on the ice one block away from his destination with the music of Tenacious D in his earphones.
Nursing his broken ankle, Mr. Najera had this advice for his fellow New Yorkers: “Walk like a penguin.”
At New York Methodist Hospital in Park Slope, Brooklyn, Dr. Lawrence Melniker, vice chairman for quality management of the emergency medicine department, saw a dislocated shoulder, a dislocated elbow, a foot fracture and an ankle fracture, between the normally quiet hours of 8 a.m. and noon on Thursday. Maimonides has treated 401 patients for falls and other injuries over the last two weeks, compared, for example, with 138 in a two-week period in November.
“I’m literally standing between patient rooms right now,” said Dr. Richard D’Agostino, chief of orthopedic surgery at St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn, on Long Island, as he took a break from surgery. “It’s just ridiculous how busy we’ve been.”
“I’ve seen about three people today with rotator cuff tears, just from shoveling,” he said.
Shoveling, especially shoveling wet, heavy snow like the kind that fell on Wednesday, is, of course, well known for straining the heart.
On Monday, Rosalie Weiss, 64, thought she would do her husband and her “very tiny little mail lady” a favor: shovel not only her 25-foot-long driveway, but also the walkway in front of her home, which leads to the mailbox.
She was afraid her husband, who is 62, would come home and do it and then have a heart attack. “So I did it, instead. And then I got a heart attack.” On Thursday, she was recovering at Maimonides, and considering buying her husband a snowblower.
Dr. Richard Shlofmitz, the chairman of the cardiology department at St. Francis, estimated that in the 24 hours after a bad winter storm, the number of people coming to the emergency room with heart ailments has been two to three times higher than normal. These problems include angina and myocardial infarction, the clinical term for a heart attack.
A whole shift of about 100 hospital workers — doctors, nurses, housekeepers, maintenance workers and cooking staff — spent the night at St. Francis to be ready for one of the recent snowstorms. “It’s not acceptable for an E.R. physician to say, ‘Look, I can’t get out of my driveway,’ ” said Dr. Mark P. Hoornstra, the hospital’s director of emergency medicine.
In New York City, the Fire Department has been putting two dozen extra ambulances on the road during the storms to handle several hundred more calls a day and account for the longer travel time on slushy streets, Frank Dwyer, a spokesman, said.
Balletic or clumsy, young or old, daring or cautious, no one seems immune to slipping and falling. Yusef Haq, 53, a businessman who divides his time between New York and Bangladesh, thought he was correctly dressed in snow boots, but that did not stop him from slipping and trying to brace his fall with his hand. In the Maimonides waiting room, he rated the pain in his wrist as a 10 out of 10; it turned out he had fractured it.
“The natural instinct is to try to break your fall by putting out your hands,” said Dr. Michael Hausman, chief of hand and elbow surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital on the Upper East Side. “I’ve probably seen five or six broken wrists a week the last few weeks with all the snow. In the fall, it’s maybe one every two or three weeks.”
Zeng Chen, 12, was headed to Intermediate School 187 from his home in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, when he hit a seemingly invisible patch of ice and all 5-feet-5-inches of him slammed onto the ground. “My foot twisted and I heard a pop,” he said. His ankle was sprained.
His father, Yushu Chen, 48, a restaurant worker, missed work and forfeited at least $100 in pay to be with him. “The boss is not mad,” his son said, translating from Chinese.
Who is injured and how often reflects one’s station in life. At Mount Sinai, where he sees the gamut of Upper East Side calamities, Dr. Hausman saw a correlation between injuries and “the degree of vanity.”
“I’m always amazed at how many people I see walking around in the snow with high heels or stiletto-heeled boots, instead of crampons and hiking boots,” he said. (Rain boots are bad too, he said, because of their smooth, flat soles.)
“They’re slaves to fashion and they pay the price,” Dr. Hausman said.
Meanwhile, the characteristic injury of an Upper East Side building superintendent, he said, is a finger mutilated by a snow blower.
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