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"I almost got hit," she said.
The 20-year-old Olney woman was seriously distracted: Valdez was busy sending text messages from her cell phone to her friends as she ambled through Center City.
OMG. Texting can be a hazardous occupation.
All those multitaskers who tap furiously on keypads of mobile devices - often while walking, biking, blading, driving - are suffering crashes and burns, not to mention assaults to the ego.
LOL? Not the American College of Emergency Physicians, whose members often see the results in ERs. The group recently expressed concern over the disturbing rise in injuries - and even deaths - related to texting "at inappropriate times."
"The fact that you have to look at your cell phone, even for that one second, is dangerous," Angela F. Gardner, vice president of the physicians group, said in an interview. The ER at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, where Gardner works, sees about one texting-related injury a week, she said. That included a man who fell off a Segway, plummeting over a seawall, and suffered a concussion and broken wrist.
Oblivious on-the-move thumb jockeys have fallen off treadmills and horses, crashed bicycles and motorcycles, stumbled down steps, wandered into traffic, and bumped into lampposts, telephone poles, trash cans, other pedestrians - you name it.
Web sites such as CrackBerry.com (for BlackBerry addicts) and MocoSpace.com (a mobile social network) carry war stories. One woman toppled a flower display at a funeral. A man at a wedding banged into the bride. And that doesn't even include all the driving-and-texting mishaps.
In the last six months, Russ Harris, vice chief of the emergency department at Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center in Camden, has treated cases of what he calls "texting and tripping."
In one, a teen chipped her front teeth after stumbling and failing to put out her hand to stop the fall. She was determined to save her cell. In another, a young woman broke a wrist when she tripped.
"People are just distracted," he said. "You see people texting and walking all the time. That's all people are doing."
Most injuries are relatively minor, but in San Francisco, a woman who was texting died when she stepped off the curb without looking and was struck by a truck.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, which compiles injuries treated at select ERs, has received several reports related to texting since last year. In one, a 13-year-old girl was messaging her boyfriend while cooking noodles and lost her grip on the pan. She suffered first-degree burns.
The number of mobile dispatches has soared in recent years. In just one month last year, U.S. wireless carriers reported 48.1 billion messages - nearly five times the 9.8 billion over a similar period in 2005, said CTIA - The Wireless Association.
In a Yankee Group survey in July, 40 percent of cell owners said they used text messaging regularly, said senior analyst Jill Aldort. Among 13- to 17-year-olds, that number jumped to 70 percent.
Valdez proudly described herself as a "text queen. I text everywhere, anywhere."
That has led to some mobile misadventures. A few weeks ago, she was working her thumbs, head down, as she walked to the restroom in the back of a restaurant. She finished her business (still texting) and came out of the stall to find three men standing at the urinals. Oops.
"They turned around and stared at me," she said. "I was so embarrassed."
Dilena Perez, 18, of Millville, N.J., was sending messages to MocoSpace.com while traveling the hallway between classes at her high school when she banged into a trash can.
"People laughed," she said. "I laughed, too.
"When I'm texting, I'm in my own world," Perez said by way of explanation.
That, of course, is the problem.
"Clearly, if you're engaged in texting that requires concentration, it's very difficult to do another task, especially walking in a big city," said Ralph Riviello, an associate professor of emergency medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.
Though he regularly treats tumbles, he seldom knows the circumstances of the injury, he said. Riviello and other ER doctors suspect banged-up texters may be too chagrined to confess the obsession.
"You're going to have to extract that information," said Harris, of Lourdes.
Texters cannot focus on both near (phone) and far (sidewalk) objects at the same time or switch back and forth as quickly as they think, he said. "With time, we're knocking out our visual and audio cues that are grounding us in our environment."
Younger generations, who were practically born with cell phones, have the expectation of immediate access, whenever and wherever, said Jeff Ritchie, an associate professor of English and digital communications at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa.
"They ignore context," he said. If texting is OK in one surrounding (say, at home), then it must be just dandy in the car, on the sidewalk, at the funeral.
Legislation has focused on driving and talking or texting on handheld devices, partly because of high-profile accidents. Some states, including New Jersey, have outlawed the practice. Pennsylvania could follow this year.
Chicagoans, however, would get slapped with a misdemeanor and $25 fine if caught crossing streets and texting under a proposed law. The Windy City appears to have an epidemic of teetering text walkers. Northwestern University's downtown ER regularly sees injuries from nasty slips while texting, according to news reports. Recently, an aide to presidential candidate Barack Obama twisted her ankle when she stepped off a curb while under the influence of her BlackBerry.
Locally, Kacy Smith, 24, of Camden, was shopping a couple of weeks ago at the Gallery and texting, of course, when she smacked into the plate-glass window of Five Below. She got a nice walnut on her forehead.
"It's still sore," the nursing assistant said Thursday.
Smith hasn't changed her habits. She "all the time" bumps into pedestrians. "Usually," she said, "they're texting themselves."
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