GAIL WHITE No matter whose idea it was, it was far from a good one

The stories are a bit conflicting about whose bright idea it was to put my mother on a pair of ice skates.
"He kept telling me to go put the skates on," my mother insisted, placing the blame on my father.
"We told her we thought it wasn't a good idea," Dad said in relaying his side of the story. "But she wanted to try it."
My sister April was present for the debacle.
"Why didn't you stop her?" I both pleaded and demanded.
April insisted that she, too, had tried to dissuade our mother.
"She walks with a cane," I said slowly, trying to impress upon all of them the utter insanity of this stunt.
Mom attempted the ice skating feat on a Sunday afternoon. Her surgery was Monday.
The fall severed the bone in her forearm.
"They said she will need some pins and nuts and bolts and stuff," my father said when he called late Sunday evening to inform me of the "accident."
I laid awake much of the night struggling with whether my mother had a death wish or my family was trying to kill her.
Still considering it
I was still debating the issue when I arrived at my parents' house Monday. But Mom was in pretty good spirits and was most upset about "all this fuss over a broken arm."
"How far did you skate?" I asked Mom as she sat in the living room before heading to the hospital for surgery, her bandaged forearm lying on a pillow.
She opened her mouth to answer and then closed it abruptly and shook her head. She didn't quite have the blades under her feet for any amount of time, it seems.
When my sister and father took her to the emergency room the night before, a nurse had asked why she had grass stains on her knees. Apparently she had trouble getting to the lake and crawled a good bit of the way.
"This was a sign," I informed them all. They all agreed. Then my sister began to giggle, remembering the look on the nurse's face when she found out Mom had ice skates on when she "slipped on the ice." Apparently, Mom had left out some of the details of her fall.
The giggle had turned into a chuckle when we arrived at the hospital Monday afternoon. April dropped Mom and me off at the front door while she parked the car.
Mom started in through the revolving door.
I thought she might have difficulty pushing the door, so I hopped in behind her.
I thought wrong.
Truly, the space allotted in revolving doors is for one person only. Breathing down my mother's neck, we shuffled around -- and then we stopped.
I was carrying my purse, my work bag, my mother's purse and her overnight bag. My mother's purse did not make it.
Stuck between the inside and the outside, this "Laurel and Hardy," mother-daughter duo attempted to back up in the revolving door.
A laughing matter
After several minutes of bumping, pushing and smooshing, I pulled the purse through, and we shuffled around inside. We were laughing so hard we were barely able to tell the registration desk attendant who we were.
We fell into hysterics in the waiting room.
The doctor came to get Mom's medical history.
"Diabetes?"
No," Mom replied.
"Heart disease?"
"No," Mom answered again.
"Any previous surgeries?"
"No," Mom said, very matter of fact.
Luckily, my sister and I were listening.
"Mom," we said, looking at her in amazement. "You had brain surgery."
"Oh yeah!" she said in surprise, looking at the doctor. "I did. I had brain surgery."
The doctor looked at her as if perhaps she needed another one.
He soon realized it runs in the family when the nurse arrived to take Mom into surgery.
"Leave your glasses here," the nurse told Mom.
"Better talk loud," my sister said to the nurse. "She can't hear without them."
gwhite@vindy.com