I was sleeping well after arriving home but was awoken suddenly by Ericka's helper this afternoon. It seems that Ericka had done a backward summersault out of the medical transport van that was going to be taking her to a doctor's appointment. It is a rear-lift van and her chair had gotten stuck as she was entering it. So she stood up from her chair, stumbled and did the summersault, falling out the side doors of the van and landing on the ground.
She did remarkably well, the training she's done with our friend the aikido black belt kicking in at all the right times, but is still quite lucky she didn't get anything more than very minor injuries. Some bumps and scrapes and maybe a mild concussion (we'll be monitoring her tonight) but nothing broken and nothing strained to the point she can't use it.
We called 911 and had a whole bevy of cute fire fighters show up to help get her upright again. (One of them looked like he'd walked straight out of a Leonard & Larry cartoon.) I then took her in to the St. John's hospital emergency room. She was evaluated by a nice physician's assistant named Mary, they took X-rays of her sore shoulder and ankle and determined nothing was broken. She was then sent home with some pain medication for the general aches and instructions to have someone stay with her for 24 hours and wake her up every four hours to do basic neurological checks.
So I'm planning at this point to take at least part of the night off work to keep an eye on her, though we do have Ctein and Catherine Crockett staying with us to lend a hand if necessary. Overall, we're all relieved that things are not bad and nothing worse happened.