Was there any karmic reason I had the recent fall from the ladder and hurt my knee or was it just my own carelessness?

We can tell you this was entirely karmic. It was a metaphoric display of needing to be in balance and not leaning too far in the wrong direction, and this had corollaries in prior lifetime experiences where you took risks that were personally beneficial, were they to work out, but in the doing met with a calamity of some kind and harmed yourself as well as others from the consequences. So this was a perfect karmic orchestration. You were there, and your wife was there, who was also a karmic player in the past episodes that shared in the downside that followed your comeuppance, and was there to witness and provide energy as a witness to your downfall and shared the pain to some degree with you and its aftermath. You were given a divine save here to prevent a worse outcome. There could have been serious fractures that took place that would have sidelined you at a terrible time in terms of your schedule and immediate plans. So despite the painful lesson of your injury, it will not be permanent. It will heal completely but the suffering will be severe and quite real, and you are already experiencing this, that more than a week later your knee is still severely painful. This is part of the karmic penalty required to see this through and rebalance things, but that will happen, and this will have served you greatly, and at the same time with no permanent long-term damage done. That is a divine blessing bestowed to benefit you in support of your mission. So this is why you had, in a sense, a kind of blackout of the crucial seconds in not recalling the positioning of your body and any thought about the ground rushing towards you and how to take the fall, so to speak. This was completely arranged by an Archangel intervention to see that your angle of descent was such that your left knee contacted the ground first, at the proper angle to then act as a shock absorber and take the brunt of the force for your total mass, as the most effective but yet safe way to cushion the blow so there would not be a permanent injury or one so severe it would require many weeks, and potentially a surgical intervention.