I’ve shared a lot about learning to live with uncertainty, with change, with the I don’t know, and apparently some untoward part of me (perhaps my renegade lower self Spankie), thought it might be enlightening to give me the opportunity to see how well I was doing, because on June 21, in unusual, weird, and terribly inconvenient circumstances, I fell and fractured the proximal humerus of my right arm.

A couple of days before, I had noticed that there was water gurgling up from the ground at the edge of a grassy area that bordered the cement driveway in front of my house creating a widening stream flowing into the bushes in the planting area next to the door.

A little while later, Woodfin Water showed up and said the leak was coming from the underground pipes connected to a house diagonally across the road. Shortly after they started digging, one of the workers knocked on my door. He said they would have to take down all the mailboxes. There were seven of them on the platform structure. He said it would only be temporary.

By evening, when Woodfin Water left for the day, the road in front of my house was a mess of wet and dirt, and the whole mailbox structure had been dug up and seemingly hurled onto uneven, grassy, muddy downhill ground to the back of my side of the road.

By that Friday, June 21, the pipes were finally fixed and Woodfin Water packed up and left. The mailboxes were still down, and I had not received mail for three days. After dinner, I decided I was going to walk down to where the mailboxes were, and since I was expecting a check, and since my box was facing up, I thought it would be easy enough to traverse the short distance of slightly hilly grass and seemingly dry red mud and take a look inside.

I was wrong. I can’t say I’ll ever know exactly what happened, but in an instant, I was lying on the ground, pain when I moved my upper arm, a bang on my chin, my knees affected and wobbly, and no one around. It was hard to see me, and it took a while before my dear friend and neighbor Steph and her daughter Maya who lived directly across the road, heard my cries for help and came running. After quickly ascertaining the situation, I asked Steph to call the paramedics.

The world of doctors and hospitals and allopathic medicine was just one of the many fears I would be invited to face through this event. I do go to the dentist, and since I have eye issues, I do go to the eye doctor, but that’s about it. Over many decades, with the help of channeled guidance, plus my over eight year practice of Wisdom Healing Qigong, I have come to understand that everything is energy. And I’m learning how to feel and move that energy, and to trust in my body’s innate ability to heal.

The paramedics arrived and got me into the ambulance. The first thing they wanted to do was put an IV in my arm and start pumping pain meds. They said that it was going to be a very bumpy ride to the hospital and I was going to be in a lot of pain. I told them nothing hurt as long as I held my arm to my stomach. They argued with me, said that when I got to the ER they would probably want to start pain meds anyway, and that it would make it easier if we started them now. I clearly declined, but out of curiosity, I asked what kind of meds they wanted to give me. They said fentanyl and morphine. I looked at them as if they were mad. The only drug I took, and only when I needed to for anxiety, was usually half (yes half) of 0.25mgs of generic Xanax. My body was that sensitive. Again, I assured the paramedic guys I was not in pain, and bumpy truck and all, that I would make it to the hospital just fine. And I did.

I had never been to the ER at Mission Hospital in Asheville and part of me was preparing for the worst. A memory of the last ER I had been in flashed through my mind. It was in 1973, at one of the worst hospitals in The Bronx when my father had been shot in the neck and throat in a hold up at the grocery store he managed near Yankee Stadium. That ER was a crowded space with injured people haphazardly arranged around the room, some bloody, some crying out, me, half in shock, rocking and keaning at the edge of an old, hard chair, my mother and then husband attending to my father who, due to lack of available rooms, had been placed on a gurney and left alone, without being given any meds, against a dark wall in the dingy hallway.

Quickly moving into action, my husband thought to call our family dentist, my father’s friend, Dr. Tolk, for help. Dr. Tolk was a miracle. He got my father immediately transferred to the best hospital with the top head and neck surgeon. And yes, my father Morris, who we suspected, like his feline namesake, had nine lives, survived, and years later went on to “graduate” from Hospice at ninety-one and live to ninety-four and a half.

But everything went fairly smoothly in the ER at Mission. I got into a room very quickly and Steph was allowed to come be with me. The rest took a really long time. Xrays, CT scan, lying in that freezing room, mud all over my calf-length leggings and lapis blue Paris Opera Ballet T-shirt with the neckline cut wide so it fell off the shoulder, shaking from nerves and cold, not allowed to take any Xanax or drink more than a sip of water in case I needed surgery, a nightmare I promptly put out of my mind.

While we waited, I called my sister in Colorado to tell her what was happening. She asked if I wanted her to come to NC. This, for me, brought up a whole mess of long ago business between us in which I had sworn to her that I would never ask for her help with anything. It was a very old story, so setting it aside, I welcomed her help. She flew to Asheville the next day, Saturday, and wound up staying for a week, a week that for me was filled with unexpected and difficult realizations.

Back to the ER. I had been in my room for over four hours when my lovely nurse, Kyle, finally came back in to give me the report. There was a hairline fracture of my proximal humerus, which is at the top of the bone between the elbow and shoulder of my right arm. He said it would heal by itself in a couple of months, and I only needed to use a sling, which he slipped over my head and adjusted around me.

It was almost midnight by the time Steph drove us home and helped me up the four steep steps to my door. Exhausted and traumatized, I was a mess — physically, emotionally, mentally. And I had a ton of things to figure out. At seventy-seven, living alone, already dealing with old knee issues now exacerbated by the fall, I didn’t know how I was even going to do simple things. And the thought of getting naked in front of anyone who would need to help me take a shower mortified me. Even though I  had come to accept, appreciate, and even love my body for the miracle it is, it has often been a challenge witnessing the constant changes that take place as I move through time.

My sister Fran arrived late the following evening, and immediately went into fixer mode. I could tell her mind was running a mile a minute, most likely calculating how to take control of the situation. I, however, was enveloped in my trauma, and my sister’s loud, often agitated voice (from her perspective, I never spoke loud enough), assaulted the usual peaceful energy of my living space. Yet, enormously grateful that she was there, I struggled to adjust.

During the next days, as I tried to engage in what needed to be done, I felt surreal, like I wasn’t anchored to anything anymore. The reality that had existed for me a short time before seemed to be collapsing around me. My whole body felt precarious, insubstantial, like it couldn’t hold me up or anchor me, like I was fading in and out of form.

Several times, overwhelmed, I spontaneously dissolved into tears in front of my sister only to discover how uncomfortable that made her. Apparently, Fran doesn’t cry. And if I felt the need to speak my momentary anxieties and fears, I found that she took them as definitive truth. There didn’t seem to be any understanding of a constant flow of changing emotions. I didn’t know how to navigate this kind of communication.

Still traumatized, I was not able to logically respond to her initial suggestions of what I would need. For example, when she first said that I would need to get home health care and a physician’s referral for it, I reacted from my emotional state at the time. I didn’t want strange people coming to my home and doing personal things, I told her, which seemed to mean to her that she would have to find a way to convince me of what she believed I needed. The fact was that I already knew exactly what I might need, that I had even called various agencies and my insurance company for information that morning, but I also needed my own way and my own time to acclimate to so many changes, and to explore all options.

We got a lot done that week. There were constant orders on Amazon — various slings to try in place of the terribly big and uncomfortable one from the hospital; a raised toilet seat with arms; a transfer bench for the bathtub; a new shower head with a longer hose. Was this what my life had become? I also made arrangements with Steph to help me with things like mail and garbage and recycling and checking in on me. I asked another dear friend Margo, who had also been my massage therapist for twenty-five years, if she’d be willing to help me with showers. She was. And I scheduled my first orthopedic appointment which my sister would take me to.

Fran and I continually placed delivery orders from Whole Foods, my sister intent upon leaving me a freezer full of individual servings of baked chicken and vegetables, and her favorite pasta dishes — pasta with beef, sauce, and veggies, huge slices of lasagna. To Fran, Food Is Love. Even though this was not how I usually ate, and I didn’t have much of an appetite that week, I was so grateful to her for doing this. After she went home, and I had to find ways to lefthandedly navigate my life, I so enjoyed these single portion feasts.

In addition to the doing of things, it became obvious many times that week that my sister and I processed the saying of things very differently. At times it was like we spoke different languages, each of us often feeling misinterpreted, each of us attempting to explain our perspective to the other. It was exhausting. I felt like almost anything I said was taken in a way I didn’t mean. We came to the mutual conclusion that we lived in very separate realities, most of my life fueled by exploring the big questions, like Who am I? Why am I here?, things my sister said she never had any interest in. In our better moments, we tried to except and honor our differences.

When my sister left Saturday morning, I was teary. For me, it had been a super stressful week on every level. I again told her how grateful I was to her for everything, and also how I wished I had been able to better communicate with her. She seemed annoyed and didn’t want to hear it. We hugged tentatively, and she said she’d rather wait outside for her Uber.

Later that evening, Fran texted me telling me that the plane was early and she caught the early bus. She sounded upbeat and made no reference to anything else. When she called the next day to ask how I was, it sounded as if, for her, the previous week had never happened. I wondered if she was squelching, erasing, denying any uncomfortable leftover emotions, or, if she was simply able to immediately move beyond them. Either way, I felt somewhat relieved as we picked up conversing in the same surface way we usually communicated before her visit.

Alone in my quiet again living space, it felt anything but peaceful. I began to see how what had happened called up some of my biggest fears — aging, vulnerability, having to deal with the medical arena, living alone, having to ask for help, not being able to take care of myself, exacerbated knee issues, vision issues causing imbalance, having to actually get naked in front of someone. What was I to make of this?

There is an expression that says when a bad thing happens, find the “gift” in it. I don’t subscribe to the use of the word “gift” in that context. I take responsibility for what I create in my life consciously or unconsciously. I know I get what I focus upon, whether I want it or not, and I also know that some creations are a lot more complicated than they seem. In this circumstance, finding the “gift” seems simplistic, even ridiculous. My advice to myself was to feel all the feelings; contemplate any new awarenesses, new understandings, new choices, and possibilities; contemplate how to raise my vibration above the many limited thoughts, beliefs, expectations, and self-talk I had watched spin around in my mind unattended for too long. You get what you focus upon…

One evening, alone, depressed and teary, a small pile of soggy tissues growing before me, I noticed an aura of deep orange light pouring through the balcony door window. I walked over and looked out as surreal colors painted themselves across the sunset sky after the earlier rain. Like I would usually do, I grabbed my iPhone attempting to take a horizontal photo with my left hand, only to realize it was impossible. Afraid of missing the moment, I quickly turned the camera vertical and was able to capture a few images. Afterwards, as I stood for a long while gazing upon that scene of immense beauty, I found my heart feeling a little bit lighter, a little more hopeful, even a little more open to remembering that all things are possible.