Please forgive the utterly personal nature of this story. The impulse to "reach out" has just overtopped the dam of sensible restraint. TMI? Just ignore me in that case.

A little context. (Or in other words, I desperately need to download.) I got home yesterday from an unexpected two-week trip. My mother, in her 90s and rather frail, took a little fall in her apartment on Aug. 19. Her full-time carer quite properly called 911. At the hospital no significant damage was found at first, but as she was in significant pain they kept her and did more tests and found a tiny, short hairline crack in a pelvic bone. I got there that same day. Mom was not doing very well on the whole and incoherent. After another day in the hospital on fluids, she was sent home with orders for physical therapy. In less than 24 hours she developed breathing problems and we had to call 911 again. A busy night in the ER, we almost didn't get in. Rehospitalized some hours later, in a tiny, weird glassed-in room designed for contagious patients--all they had.

There follows a blurry memory (though I did take notes) of three nights in the hospital with zero sleep, during which Mom part of the time had delusions and was fighting the nurses who tried to treat her. A couple nights sleeping on the floor of Mom's apartment, which led to cramps in both legs severe enough that I briefly feared a blood clot. Then sleeping in Mom's powered adjustable lounge chair in her living room, which felt wrongish but a question of survival. (My brother traveled up from Florida and needed the couch.) I won't attempt details. The physical and mental exhaustion has been indescribable. How people cope who do not have my mother's safety net of family, friends and carers I can't begin to imagine, but that is another diary.

I'll get to the totally freakish thing, trust me. :-)

The good news is first, that we got Mom back home again this Friday, bedridden for the time being but breathing okay, pain and confusion under pretty good control, and with enough back-up help that I felt safe leaving her with her carer for a while, to go home, pay my own bills and get some rest. (Am in frequent phone contact too.)

Other good news, and I want to shout this: in the course of the most lengthy conversations we'd had in literal decades, I came out to my bro as nonbinary...actually, my first IRL coming-out, ever. It was so much better than I ever even hoped; I expected him to be incredulous, scoff, put it down as another one of my cockamamie notions, but instead he was totally accepting and in fact, went on to share something about himself that he had never told anyone previously. And in all, we felt closer than ever since childhood or maybe since forever. Stunning.

But even that is not the totally freakish thing!

So, I've been home for a little more than 24 hours and am a humongous mess on every level. (Last day for the community swimming pool today, I went and could do only 1/5 of a normal workout, for example.)

Woke up from an afternoon nap, headed to the kitchen for a snack, suddenly heard this unbelievable RROOAAAARRRRRR......coming from inside the house.

The vacuum cleaner had just, in the middle of nothing, turned itself on.

I pulled the plug at the wall socket. Checked the switch on the handle. Off.

Tiny little addition: ashamed to confess, but due to a mix of laziness and the unexpected, the vacuum cleaner had been plugged into that dining room wall socket for a good month. During which I'd actually made two visits to Mom, the first in early August, before she fell.

When I am leaving on a trip all sorts of apprehensions of disaster plague me, and to the extent there is time, I tend to baby my own little neuroticisms. Getting ready to leave in early August, I got obsessed with the state of a light switch in the dining room, and went downstairs and pulled the fuse for the dining room, replacing it when I returned.

Leaving for the second trip, with Mom hospitalized, I did the same thing. Earlier today I got around to restoring the fuse. A couple of hours later, the vacuum turned itself on. If that had happened while I was away ??????????!!

 Insights and comments welcome. I've always unplugged the coffeepot and surge protectors before travel and will now be super sure to unplug the vacuum when not in use! Electrically literate readers, anything else I need to know?!!!