Preventing Accidents
One of my friends is paralyzed from head downwards. He is totally bedridden and completely dependent on his care-givers. Fortunately, he has an extremely loyal wife who is looking after him and two grown-up children who help their mother with his care. They had to completely overhaul their future plans and adopt to the current situation because of the instantaneous illness of the breadwinner of the family. He was driving his car in the vicinity of Bibile at night when he hit the back of a parked tipper truck and sustained a spinal cord injury around the cervical (neck) region and was instantaneously paralyzed completely neck downwards.
I never have the guts to ask him the crucial question whether he was wearing a seat belt when he met with this near fatal accident. There are many laws that are passed to help citizens and the seatbelt law is one of them. This prevents the driver or a passenger from getting thrown to the air and hitting other objects and injuring his/her head or parts of the body. E.g. A front-seat passenger can be hurled into the windscreen of the vehicle causing a mortal head injury or be thrown out of the vehicle through the wind-screen.
The law to wear a helmet while riding a bike is to protect you from head and neck injury which also could be fatal . It is common to see motor cycle riders on our roads taking passengers, sometimes their wives and children, who are not wearing protective helmets. This is extremely callous of these husbands and fathers to jeopardize the lives of their own wives and children. The plight of such passengers who sustain head and physical injuries is abominable. Human life is precious and sacrosanct. But sometimes seeing the long and tedious process of rehabilitation that these survived victims have to go through, some people wish that it is better that they died during the accident than survive.
The worst plight is to have a driver, may be your husband, or your father, or a relative or a friend who is driving under the influence of intoxicating liquor or addictive drugs. Such drivers may be so much intoxicated, they do not understand the danger into which they are putting their passengers. They are playing with the lives of their own wives, children, relations and friends. The danger is that they are so much intoxicated that they do not listen to the advice of their friends or family. Drunken and intoxicated irrational drivers may even jeopardize the life and limbs of their sober advisors.
Many road accidents occur at night while driving when the driver is tired and feeling sleepy. If you are dozing off while driving, think about your life and the lives of your passengers, who may be your family members or friends. It is very wise to excuse yourself and confess your condition and get somebody else in the vehicle to drive till you rest a little. If there is no other driver in the vehicle take it off the road, sleep and rest for an hour or two till you are rested and fit to drive. Here you would be doing a great favor to your passengers and to yourself.
Home Accidents
Many accidents also happen in the school, office and also in the home environment. Many accidents are caused by fire and the kitchen is the most common location where many of these fires take place. Obviously the kitchen is the place where we prepare our meals. We use gas cylinders, electricity or in some villages even fire wood to prepare food. We start cooking and get involved with other essential household chores. E.g. If you have a baby, you have to feed the baby, clean and bathe him/her, change her/his nappies. As a busy mother and house-keeper you have to multitask. You forget what is happening in the kitchen till you see an unusual amount of smoke or burning smell coming from that quarter. If you are lucky this fire could be put off with a thick blanket. If you are too late you may have to call the fire brigade to extinguish it.
Electrocution is a common accident. In the midst of a scorching sunny day a floor fan of the house is refusing to start. You take the plug off the wall and realize that the plug connections and wires are in perfect order. May be the connection in the wall plug socket is out of order. You try to perform a do-it-yourself repair while the electricity is still on. We all know that there is a circuit breaker in every house which is wired legally by professional electricians. The purpose is to disable electricity from the area where you are trying the do-it-yourself repair. You see the sparks flinging from the wall plug and get a shock. This time you are lucky, the circuit breaker goes off and the electricity is shut off in the region where you got a shock. If not for the circuit breaker this accident could have been fatal.
Many fires have been triggered by people smoking in bed. Smoking itself is an extremely bad habit that will cause lots of health problems. The bed is the last place where anybody should smoke. Smoke detectors and smoke and fire alarms are a worthwhile investment to prevent household fires from spreading. Checking and repairing the electrical wiring regularly is money spent wisely.
Another way to prevent household accidents is to keep medications and hazardous chemicals under lock and key so that children will not have access to them. Multi-colored medication pills and candies or sweets look very similar to the eyes of innocent children. They cannot distinguish between the household detergents and fruit juice or cool drinks. Drug overdose and ingesting of household chemicals can be lethal.
We all know that it is cheaper to repair and paint our houses ourselves than hire skilled workers or contractors to perform regular household repairs. When we compare the statistics of household accidents incurred by do-it-yourself "experts" we think it is worthwhile hiring experienced technicians and expert contractors and utilizing their expertise in doing these household jobs at an extra cost. When we figure out the cost and suffering of spinal cord, bone and joint injuries sustained by well-intended do-it-yourself enthusiasts from falling from ladders and roofs, we say it is worthwhile hiring experts in these fields even at an extra cost.
We may get involved with some road and home accidents during our life time. Most of these road and household accidents are preventable. Following the traffic rules meticulously on the roads and using our common sense at home can help us to stay away from permanent tragedies such as injuries to bone, joints, head and spinal cord. Prevention is definitely far better than cure.