Last week I needed my superhero shoes.

What began as knee pain recently resulted in a nine-day hospital stay for my mom. It was a surprise: At 90, she’s still mobile, interested in our activities, and busy with her own.

At least, she was.

On Monday, after my piano lesson, she told me that she needed some help. Her right knee suddenly hurt.

Fearing a blot clot, the nurse at her retirement facility advised me to take her to a local urgent-care facility. Its location next to an imaging center would provide all the help we needed, she said.

But it didn’t.

After we waited 25 minutes, a kind NP told us the imaging center didn’t offer that kind of images.

Huh?

So we bundled up and wheeled back out to my car with swirling March snow keeping us alert and shivering. We headed up the street to the ER.

You read about overcrowding in the ER. I’ve spent a more than a few hours in the waiting room for my adult son, who’s had kidney stones since he was in fourth grade, and we’ve seen many a minor complaint.

This wasn’t one.

Especially if it were a blood clot.

After 42 minutes, she was called back, just as I was about to drive her to the hospital in another city.

Back in an ER room, the testing commenced. Blood test; Doppler for the pulse in her foot to rule out an arterial clot.

“That’s helicopter time,” the doc said.

They wheeled her away. CT scan. X-ray.

My sister arrived after work from her city, an hour away. We waited.

When they wheeled Mom back, the pain was worse.

The thirty-minute dose of fentanyl faded fast.

We pushed the call button eight times to be  assured that a nurse was on the way. Oh, wait – they had to get an order. Morphine this time.

More scans. More possibilities.

After five hours, the final verdict: not an arterial blood clot. Whew! Just a Baker’s cyst and pseudo gout. The doc could drain it, but a specialist would have to drain the other fluid tomorrow.

We opted for all of it to be done tomorrow.

That was the first day. Of what became nine.

The ER experience had shown us that one of us needed to be present to be Mom’s advocate. Especially as none of the doctors agreed. Not with the ER physician or each other: not about the pseudo gout, not about the Baker’s cyst, and not about what was actually wrong.

On the third afternoon, while my sister spelled me at the hospital, I dug through my closet to pack for a couple of days.

Tucked under some folded winter blankets, a pair of brown canvas shoes peeped out. The speckled ones.

My superhero shoes!

I’d just bought them when we returned to school in fall 2020, after being sent home due to COVID the previous spring. They were cute and comfortable and would be perfect for late-summer school wear. I needed something new to get my mind off the lab coats and jeans that would be my new unofficial school uniform.

It wasn’t until the third week of teaching face-to-face, hybrid, virtual, and more models than I knew existed that I noticed my shoes at the end of the day.

Something had changed.

I slipped my foot out of the right one and picked it up. It was speckled. Pink!

The other one was, too!

True, I  was exhausted. I’d been preoccupied with teaching effectively, following the school’s new COVID protocols, and avoiding errant germs, even between classes, but I was pretty sure I hadn’t ordered speckled shoes.

It was all too strange.

I shrugged and grabbed the spray bottle filled with bleach water. One more sanitizing run on the student tables and I’d be free to go home, shed my COVID clothes, and try to enjoy the evening.

As I pulled the trigger and wafted the bleach spray over the tables, it all connected.

I’d been the one who created the pink speckles on my shoes! Four times a day, between classes and after school. With bleach water.

Oooh! I was steamed!

Not only was my mental health deteriorating, but my new clothes were, too? And literally!

A pair of shoes is a small price to pay for ensuring we stayed healthy. But really? They were brand new!

Ticked, I stopped wearing them. They looked silly and the weather was starting to turn, so that was that.

I shoved them into my closet for the rest of the school year.

In the spring, I noticed them. Ugly now, the loafers had no place in my closet.

But just as I started to pitch them, it occurred to me: those shoes represented the toughest year of my teaching life.

They also represented my resilience. My fortitude. My creativity. My super powers to teach effectively, despite everything, during COVID!

I tucked them back into the closet. One day I might need to remember that.

This week, I pulled them out again. They still fit.

What reminds you of your superpowers?