Maple Ridge Barndo

All of my thoughts about the last quarter of 2025 revolve around an event that is still incomprehensible to me. When I talk about it, it’s as if the memories have a dreamlike quality that makes my brain struggle to believe that what I’m saying is actually real.

One Monday morning in late September, I received a call from my mom’s best friend. “I’m at your Mom’s house to pick her up, and I can’t get her to the door. I’ve called her home phone and her cell phone several times, and I’m really concerned.” I called my husband at work because he was closer to her house, and I jumped into the car.

The thirty five minute drive to her house was surreal. Praying she wasn’t dead. Knowing that if she was alive, she was most likely suffering. Waiting for a phone call to find out which reality we were dealing with. Thinking my husband wasn’t calling because he didn’t want to break that kind of news to me over the phone. Finally losing all ability to wait and calling her friend who quickly said, “We found her. We’re in the basement. I have to go outside to call 911.” I arrived as the ambulance and several sheriff department vehicles were pulling into the driveway.

I raced into the house and saw my 81 year old mother on the concrete floor being supported from behind by my husband. He had found her beside the stairs, on her right hip with legs folded behind her, both obviously broken arms wrapped around the newel post she was leaning against. She had wept as he told her, “I’ve got you, Mimi. Lean on me. I’ve got you.”

The stairs were littered with broken dishes and remnants of a meal she had eaten the night before. One house shoe lay sideways on the top step. We would later understand that while taking her dishes back to the kitchen from her bedroom around 11:00 pm she had chosen to walk through the house in the dark. She had accidentally veered off course by about a foot or two and stepped unaware into the pitch blackness of the basement stairwell. Mercifully, she has no memory of any part of the fall.

I was able to ride in the ambulance with her and was relieved to hear her answering questions, albeit with some confusion due to the trauma of the long night and the pain medicine that was beginning to hit her system. The first thing she said to me was, “Make sure you get my purse.” She knew who I was, her name, and other personal information. The only thing she got wrong was her age. (She shaved off twenty years.) The ambulance took her to a nearby field to meet the helicopter that would take her to a Level One Trauma Center an hour away.

She spent six or seven hours in the emergency room while we waited for any kind of update. Friends and family trickled in and others called, anxiously waiting for news. We didn’t get to see her until she was transported to Neuro ICU late that night. They let us ride in the elevator with her. She was battered, unbelievably bruised, and completely unaware of us. She later said the only thing she remembered from the emergency room was the pain of someone moving her arms around. She said she told them, “Alright, that’s enough!” The initial setting of two badly broken wrists had to continue.

Once she was settled into ICU, we were able to go back to see her two at a time. By this time, she was awake and alert enough to carry on a little bit of conversation. We were so relieved to find her lucid and aware of who we were and where she was. The nurses explained the injuries she had sustained in the fall. A brain bleed (that would eventually resolve on its own). Two broken wrists that would require surgery as soon as the trauma surgeons could get to her. Possible neck fracture. Three fractured vertebrae. Four or five broken ribs and a liver laceration. She was swollen and literally covered in bruises from head to toe. It was obvious the right side of her body had taken the brunt of the fall.

The Lord protected her in so many ways. The brain bleed resolved without surgery. There were no skull or facial fractures even though her face and scalp were badly bruised from the fall. Her right jaw was bruised to a purple so deep it was almost black, but neither it nor her teeth were broken even though her tongue was bitten and bruised. She had multiple fractures in her back, but no spinal cord injury. She had no broken bones from the waist down which would eventually give her the mobility she needed to make progress in therapy.

During her three days in ICU, one day in the hospital, and twelve days in a rehabilitation facility we were able to piece together the story of that long night on the basement floor. It took quite a while for her to sort out memories from hallucinations. After tumbling down fifteen stairs she had actually landed about six feet away from the staircase. Mercifully, she was in and out of consciousness most of the night. She remembers coming to and not knowing where she was. She remembers coming to again and realizing she was in the basement but not knowing how she got there. (We believe that would have been after sunrise when the daylight started to come through some windows in the next room.) She remembers thinking if she could just get to the stairs, maybe she could pull herself up. She tried to crawl, but the pain was unbearable probably causing her to pass out again. She came to and managed to pull herself on her belly back to the stairs – to the spot where my husband found her. She spent those morning hours praying and quoting scripture. In her first prayers, she begged the Lord to help her get up. In her traumatized state, she thought if she could just stand up, she could get to a phone and call for help. When it became clear she could not pull herself up, she became a little aggravated at God and proceeded to tell him so. Then her prayer became “please don’t let me die down here because it would hurt my children so deeply to find me.” God graciously answered that prayer. Eventually she heard her phone ringing over and over upstairs and realized her friend would know something was wrong and get help.

She came home to our house after rehab. She was weak and exhausted, in considerable pain from her back injuries, and had extremely limited use of her hands and arms. She spent seven weeks with us, working hard through outpatient occupational and physical therapy, pain, and discouragement to regain her independence. Five days before Thanksgiving, she drove herself home and has been home ever since. She had her final surgery in December to remove the hardware that was holding her right wrist together while her bones healed.

While the physical trauma was hers alone to endure, we have all been touched by the emotional trauma of her accident. My husband is a seasoned nurse and is rarely shaken, but it was hard for him to find her so scared and broken at the bottom of those stairs. He was also the one who went back and cleaned the food and glass from the stairs and her blood from the basement floor. My brother and sister-in-law and I rotated staying with her at the hospital. I would stay two nights in a row and come home completely exhausted, only to see her falling down those stairs over and over in my mind when I closed my eyes to try to sleep. Our adult children spent every free moment visiting her in the hospital because they were so worried, but also because they knew that their visits lifted her spirits more than anyone else’s.

When I said she was 81, an image of a frail, elderly woman probably popped into your head. Not so. She has worked out faithfully for over forty years. From walking to aerobics, from Zumba to weight lifting, from yoga to Pilates, she has done it all. It’s been seven months since her accident, and if you met her you would never guess what she’s been through. She’s back to doing Pilates with a personal trainer twice a week. She’s had the inside of her house painted and is in the middle of some other decorating projects. She’s still waiting for the carpenter to install the new door at the top of the basement stairs.

Today she walked down those stairs for the first time since that horrible night. As I walked behind her I said, “Look at her go! She’s kicking ass!” She got to the bottom, threw her hands up and said, “Yep. No big deal.” And she didn’t even scold me for saying “ass.”