WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court says Justice Sonia Sotomayor broke her right shoulder in a fall at her Washington home.
The court says the 63-year-old Sotomayor will wear a sling for several weeks and undergo physical therapy. She is not expected to miss any time on the bench. The justices are hearing arguments this week and next.
The court says the fall occurred Monday morning and that a doctor confirmed the break in the afternoon. Sotomayor was in court Monday and did not appear to be in pain.
In January, emergency medical personnel treated her at home for symptoms of low blood sugar. Sotomayor is diabetic.
This news is even worse than it might appear at first glance.
The most worrisome aspect of a 63yo falling at home is usually not whatever injury is sustained, but why she fell. A 25yo who breaks her shoulder on a ski slope is one thing. The “why” is no mystery, as skiing is inherently risky even for people in excellent health, and all the concern is over the injury. But a fall at home, and definitely a fall with enough force to “break a shoulder” (whatever that means) is unusual without some cause. Many of those causes are serious quite apart from damage caused by falling.
And then we have the more concerning issue of a hypoglycemic event in January severe enough to call 911. The patient may have some quite rare condition that makes her blood sugar that labile even with adequate attention from patient and medical providers. But the odds of that are way less than one in a million. Most likely this patient’s diabetes is receiving inadequate attention from patient and/or providers. She needs to fix that, now.
Hypoglycemia is a far more urgent problem than blood sugar that is riding too high. Hypoglycemia bad enough to call 911 is a life-threatening emergency, and the problem with her current management of her diabetes that caused this episode has to be identified and corrected immediately.
I appreciate your concern, but I don’t think we need to over-think this without all relevant info. I would bet that the good Judge’s doctors are on the case.
You are pretty ignorant about Type 1 diabetes.
Type 1 is inherently harder to control, and if you go for tight control – as a younger person should – you are going to have hypoglycemic episodes on the way. But even for someone who has Type 1, a hypoglycemic event so severe the patient can’t handle it without calling 911 is a serious matter calling into question the current treatment.
No patient’s medical status is anyone’s business but their own, until and unless they choose to make it public. But what they do make public needs to make sense, and therefore has to be complete enough to make sense, or it will be second-guessed. It has to be second-guessed in the case of patients whose well-being is absolutely not just their own concern.
Maybe the incompleteness comes from bad reporting, and perhaps the patient did choose to release a story complete enough to make sense, but the reporter didn’t understand that if you talk about a 63yo falling at home, you’ve got to talk about why or you’re missing the story. But it is also possible that the patient herself showed bad judgment in releasing partial information that she knows conceals the real story. I say poor judgment because if a 63yo falls at home, it’s Care of the Elderly 101 to ask why, and the idea that just announcing a fall was going to be the end of the story was foolish, because there are literally millions of people out there who see that headline, “63yo falls at home” and immediately know to ask why. Similar concerns, and even more pressing, for a hypoglycemic episode the patient couldn’t handle on her own
Which brings us to the last possibility, that the patient doesn’t understand the seriousness of one or both of these episodes, and that’s why there was a release of information that was incomplete and uninformative. You can’t give a complete and sensible account of something if you don’t understand the subject.
Bottom line, if this patient understands her own medical condition, and doesn’t want to be second-guessed by the public based on information she can’t control (If you show up for work in a sling, that’s info you can’t control. If EMS comes to your house, maybe you can’t control that either.), she needs to make sure whoever handles her public relations releases information that gives a reasonably complete account that doesn’t force people to second-guess where the lack of understanding that is on display might be located. Again, that’s assuming the problem isn’t reporting that received a reasonably complete account, but didn’t know to report the relevant details.