At My Party features true stories about my life as a loner. Check back now and then for new stories that don't appear in Party of One.

If you're a young and healthy loner, no problem. But like all young and healthy people, you live in paradise and might not even realize it. We take for granted being able to walk, to see, to open a can of soup and cook it. We complain when the bus is late but at least when it comes we can hop up the steps and climb aboard. We complain when a lightbulb burns out but at least we can mount a stepladder and replace it.

I am a bit more aware than most of the abled/disabled thing for two reasons. The first is that I came into this world with a birth defect. Born without hip sockets, I would have grown up unable to stand, much less walk (a healthy pelvic bone has two deep sockets into which the balls at the tops of the thighbones naturally fit -- but mine was just smooth) if a vigilant pediatrician hadn't noticed that I was taking too long to learn to crawl, and that my pelvis made weird clicking sounds. The sounds were the thighbones sliding helplessly around. I wore a brace for five years, during which time the thighbone-balls were able to dig shallow sockets into my pelvic bone, which was still soft due to my being a small child. Any later and the bone would have hardened, rendering me disabled for life. In the Third World you can see many sufferers of congenital hip displasia -- that's the technical name for what I had -- using crutches or wheelchairs. In my case the only aftereffect was that I was a few years behind my grade-school classmates in terms of coordination and speed and was not allowed to ride bikes. This, of course, led to endless mockery and humiliation -- "You're a retard!" -- and nobody wanted me on their teams, not that I wanted to be on their damn teams anyway. So it all worked out. I later took up swimming and Polynesian dance and you'd never know that the hula dancer in the corner was born with congenital hip displasia.

The other reason is that my mother was stricken with yet another hip-and-leg disability totally unrelated to mine. In her case it is a neurological problem, very rare, that strikes in early old age. Due to her personal issues, she refused to seek medical advice or treatment during the first years of having been struck with this problem. So while physical therapy or other measures could have slowed it down or even halted it in its tracks, she allowed it to run rampant to the point where she kept falling and breaking bones. This summer she broke a very important bone and ended up in a wheelchair, probably for life. My mother is not a loner exactly, sort of a semiloner who loves being around her friends during the day but craves her independence in the evenings. But now she has run into terrible luck, because as a septuagenarian in a wheelchair, with a propensity for falling, she can't live alone. She would rather stay in her home than move to a nursing home, and I support her choice wholeheartedly, but she can't reach high shelves or cook anymore, nor can she drive. So a live-in caregiver occupies the guestroom. This is pure hell for Mom.

It drives her nuts that this person -- a perfectly pleasant, polite, compassionate young woman -- is always there. Even when the caregiver is out of the room, Mom seethes at the awareness that SOMEONE is in the house, that SOMEONE has to make and serve all her meals, that she can't do something as simple as get in the car and go grocery shopping without SOMEONE helping her into the front seat and doing the driving. Mom's former favorite hobbies, cruising the local thrift shops and ethnic vegetable markets, are now lost to her -- not completely, as the caregiver will take her wherever she wants to go, but what made these activities fun in the first place, the randomness and choice and spontaneity, are gone forever. Now there is always that awareness of the caregiver waiting, patiently or not, to finish up and go.

All this is to say: Young and healthy loners, take care of your bodies. Losing your health means losing your independence, and that might mean forever.