She said, ‘She wanted me to pass along that she’s been carrying your medical history for 38 years, and she thinks it’s time we finally figure out who we each actually are.’

I’ve thought about that message probably a hundred times since the call.

I don’t know her name. I don’t know anything about her except that she and I were born on the same day in the same hospital a few hours apart and somewhere in the chaos of being new humans in the world, our paperwork got scrambled and nobody ever fixed it. She knows I had a knee that needed replacing. I know she had a hysterectomy in 2004. That feels like a strange kind of intimacy, knowing something that personal about a person you’ve never met and never spoken to.

I think about her going through the same thing I’m going through right now. Sitting somewhere, probably going over old appointments in her head, wondering which doctor looked at my knee surgery in her chart and assumed she just didn’t mention it. Wondering what else got mixed up. Whether any treatment she got or didn’t get was based on the wrong information. I’ve been thinking about my own records and trying to remember if there was ever a time a doctor recommended something or avoided something and I just went along with it because they were the doctor and they had the chart in front of them.

The surgeon’s office is handling the separation process. I have to submit additional verification, original birth records, ID, and I’ll need to get a fresh blood type confirmed through their lab before the surgery can be rescheduled. It’s annoying in the logistical sense but I’m not complaining. Not even a little.

My daughter said, ‘Mom, you need to call a lawyer.’ Maybe. I don’t know.

That’s not really where my head is right now. I keep thinking about the other woman and what she said. About figuring out who we each actually are. Like we’ve both been walking around with a piece of the wrong puzzle in our hands for almost four decades and we only just figured out it didn’t belong to us.

The surgery is rescheduled for next month. The knee still hurts. That part hasn’t changed.

But I keep thinking about her, this stranger born on the same day as me, somewhere out there with my knee surgery in her file. I wonder if she’s thought about me too. I wonder if she ever looked at that record and felt like something was off, the same way I used to feel like certain things in my chart didn’t quite line up, and I just assumed I was misremembering.

The surgeon’s office said there’s no mechanism for them to connect us directly. Privacy rules. I understand it. I do.

But she got a message to me once already.