In My Mother’s Body

This is my mother’s arm, I thought, staring at the torn skin on the side of the road.

A few minutes earlier, I had been walking my Maltese and Yorkie when the neighbor’s Husky, off leash, rushed us, and I was seriously injured.

I tried to pull my dogs away.

I tried to get between them.

In the chaos, I fell onto the rocks at the curb, and one of my dogs flew out of her harness into the street.

When it was over, I was lying on the ground, my dogs frightened, pressed close to me.

Once I knew they weren’t dead, I noticed myself.

My finger was dislocated.

And broken.

For a moment, I could pop my finger back into place.

But I had no way to stabilize my right hand to pull with my left.

Shock was messing with my thinking.

That’s going to need medical attention, I thought.

Where should I go?

Then I noticed my arm.

There was a skin tear, the kind you see on an older adult, someone on prednisone or blood thinners. It needed stitches, but the skin was too thin to stitch.

My elbow hurts.

My hip hurts.

It wasn’t the pain that confused me.

It was how fast it happened.

I stared at my arm and thought:

This is my mother’s arm.

How did I get into her body?

How did I fall?

Why am I lying in rocks on the side of the road?

How can my skin tear like this?

This can’t be me.

It’s my mother’s arm.

Thin.

Fragile.

For a moment, I honestly wondered how my mother’s arm had ended up on my body.

Except it was me.

I touched my dislocated finger to see if it would move.

It wouldn’t.

It was definitely my body.

I still think of myself as the same person I’ve always been:

a young mom,

a young nurse,

a healthy person.

I’ve walked five miles a day for three years.

And now I was lying on the side of the road, bleeding, not recognizing my own body.

The changes of aging are gradual.

Until something goes wrong.

Then you see them all at once.

I sat there in the rocks, trying to get my bearings.

Not knowing

How to get my dogs, or myself, home.

What stays with me three months later isn’t just the attack.

It’s the moment of recognition, the realization that my body had crossed into a different stage of life.

No warning.

It just happened.

On the side of the road. On Halloween.

Lying in a pile of rocks, I remembered an acronym one of the paramedics used for ambulance calls in the ER:

LOLDFD: Little Old Lady Done Fell Down.

I never imagined how quickly the time would pass between being the nurse who cared for “the little old lady who fell down.”

and becoming her.