I was standing at the foot of my mother’s hospital bed, turning the little plastic band on her wrist so I could read it, and the name printed there wasn’t her name.

Let me back up, because my hands are still shaking and I keep losing my place.

I’m going to tell this the way it happened to me, even the parts I’m not proud of.

Mom went in for a knee. Just a knee. She’s 77 and she’d been limping around for two years, telling everybody she was fine, bless her heart. The quote for the surgery was $34,000, and I about fell over when I saw that number, but she’d saved for it and she wanted to be done with the cane. The morning of, she was in good spirits. She squeezed my hand and said, “I’m going to dance at Katie’s wedding.” Katie’s my daughter. The wedding’s in October. That was the last normal thing my mother said to me.

The nurse told me two hours, maybe a little more. So I sat in that waiting room with a vending machine coffee, watching the clock. Two hours came and went. Then three. I told myself surgeons run behind, that’s just how it is. But the longer it went, the more I kept getting up to ask the desk woman the same question, and she kept telling me to please have a seat.

Six hours. Six. When a doctor finally came through those doors he wouldn’t quite look at me. He said, “There was a complication.” Then he said the words that still don’t fit in my head. “We began the wrong procedure.” They’d started a spinal fusion. On my mother’s back. Forty minutes in before somebody caught it. A knee, and they opened her back instead.

I don’t remember sitting down but I was sitting down. The risk manager came out later, this calm young man with a folder, and all he’d give me was “human error.” That’s it. Two words for what they did to a 77-year-old woman. So when they finally let me back to see her, groggy and bandaged in the wrong place, I leaned over the rail and I turned that wristband on her wrist. Wrong name. Wrong birthday. Wrong procedure code, the whole thing.

I hired a malpractice attorney the next morning. Eight thousand dollars just to start, money I didn’t have, but I didn’t care. Here’s what we pieced together. The admissions nurse mixed up two patients with the same maiden name. The other woman, also up for surgery that day, got my mother’s knee replacement instead of her own. She didn’t need it. She’s in a wheelchair now because of it. Two old women, one mistake, both broken in different ways.