I’ve had a few close calls with social humiliation.

Once, we were invited to a Hanukkah party. My husband and I had parked on the couple’s street and were walking toward their house when he asked me why they were having a party a month before the holiday.

I wasn’t exactly sure when Hanukkah began, but a month did sound a little early for a celebration. I stopped to double-check the email invite before we got to the door.

We turned around and walked back to the car and returned a month later.

“I was so confused,” my husband said later. But I’m not the only one who has mixed up dates.

Another time, we were going to an 80th birthday party for one of my husband’s colleagues. We knocked at the door, and the hosts looked bewildered when they answered it.

The party was the following weekend. At least it wasn’t a surprise party.

These social mishaps are embarrassing, but in a funny way. It’s interesting how our perception of what is embarrassing changes as we age. When I was young, I was easily embarrassed by things my parents did or said. I’ll never forget being a middle schooler and sliding off my seat in the car, trying to hide, when my mom asked a question in the McDonald's drive-thru. I think it had to do with a missing Filet-O-Fish.

I experienced payback for this kind of behavior when my own children went through their tween and teenage years. Once, our daughter burst into tears in a restaurant because my husband and I were humiliating her.

By talking. To each other.

As you get older, it is harder to feel truly embarrassed. Experience teaches you not to sweat the small stuff.

Fortunately, my husband shares my sense of humor about such things. He incorporated our children’s mortification over his uncoolness as a disciplinary technique. If they were arguing or misbehaving in public, he would threaten to start dancing.

My husband’s dance moves look like someone is trying to disco while being electrocuted. The kids would shape right up.

Recently, I mentioned to him that a friend had invited me to see an Alanis Morissette concert with her the next day. He had watched a video of her performing not long ago, and said she still sounded great. I asked if he wanted me to see if I could get him a ticket, too.

He started to search for the concert on his phone but said he couldn’t find it. He probably missed it because he’s not a professional Googler like I am.

“Are you sure you have the date right?” he asked. It was pretty late at night, or I would have texted my friend to double-check. Just to be safe, I planned to confirm in the morning.

At breakfast the next day, he was flipping through the paper and came upon a story written by my colleague.

“Do you realize you are going to see a musical tonight?” he asked. This was news to me.

“Let me see that,” I said, reaching for the paper. Indeed, my colleague had previewed "Jagged Little Pill," the Morissette jukebox musical named for her most famous album.

When my friend had asked if I wanted to see "Jagged Little Pill," my brain had translated that to "Alanis Morissette concert."

Imagine I had shown up at the theater expecting to see a rock concert. I like to think I would have quickly figured it out when they handed me a playbill. But I wonder what embarrassing comments I would have made to my friend during dinner beforehand.

It’s hard for me to hold back from sharing a good story -- especially if it’s at my expense. So I confessed my earlier confusion to her on the drive to the theater. She laughed so hard she cried. I wonder how long you would have sat there, wondering when Alanis was going to come out, she joked.

The musical -- the story of a dysfunctional family, set to Morissette’s greatest hits -- was reasonably entertaining. My husband is not a fan of musicals; I had to laugh, thinking about his expression if I had accidentally gotten him a ticket to one. I’m sure I would never have heard the end of it.

It was a story in my own paper that saved me from another episode of social mortification.

Isn’t that ironic?

Pain is designed to scare us.

It’s a warning that we’ve been hurt -- a red flag that something isn’t right.

Though it’s a universal human experience, it's also so individualized that we can never really know how someone else feels in it. Most of us desperately want to avoid it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about acute and chronic pain since my mom broke her arm last month. After a complicated surgery to repair her fractures, the surgeon prescribed opioids to deal with the pain. This is standard medical protocol.

But anyone who has paid attention to the country’s opioid crisis may wonder about the safety of taking these painkillers. In a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published last spring, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that more than 51 million people -- more than 20% of U.S. adults -- have chronic pain, and that 17 million -- almost 7% of adults -- have high-impact chronic pain (pain that limits their activities most days, if not every day).

Chronic pain is more common among older adults than any other age group. And yet their treatment options come with significant risks, including addiction to pain medication.

The billionaires sitting atop America’s empire of pain are the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma and the highly addictive and wildly profitable drug OxyContin.

The hyperaggressive marketing of Oxy contributed to a devastating and worsening national epidemic. From 1999 to 2021, nearly 645,000 people died from an overdose involving opioids, including prescription and illicit opioids, according to the CDC.

In December, the Supreme Court listened to the government’s objection to a multibillion-dollar bankruptcy settlement with Purdue Pharma, in which the company would be restructured as a nonprofit to address the public health crises created by the epidemic.

Members of the Sackler family agreed to contribute up to $6 billion to the plan in exchange for immunity from future civil liability for opioid-related claims. The Sacklers want to protect the $10 billion moved to offshore accounts in the years leading up to Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy. (Sackler lawyers say more than 40% of that went to pay Purdue’s taxes.)

The Supreme Court will decide later this year whether the Sacklers get this shield of immunity and remain one of the wealthiest families in the world.

In a sane society, a high court would be deciding if the Sacklers ought to rot in prison.

In a 2021 story for The Bulwark, writer Saul Lelchuk asked if the Sacklers were "the most evil family in American history." He argued that the Sacklers caused more widespread harm to America’s social fabric -- and correspondingly, more American deaths -- than any other single American family in history.

That ought to win them the title.

I asked an older reader who lives with chronic pain to describe what it’s like trying to manage it with opioids. Until recently, he had been functioning while taking a painkiller called tramadol. But he thinks he may have fractured his back, which caused his pain to spike, and now his doctor has prescribed oxycodone -- a much stronger opioid.

“Taking sufficient painkillers to reduce (not eliminate) the pain means I do not think clearly unless I make a special effort, on even the simplest of chores, to ensure I am doing it correctly,” he wrote. Every act of basic living, such as balancing a checkbook or putting the groceries away, requires extra attention.

It’s more mental stress on top of the physical stress.

"And being spaced out or snarling in pain really doesn’t help my relationship with my wife,” he added.

The most disturbing part of his account described how little the medication was helping him improve.

"Unfortunately, the pain keeps increasing, and as it does, my dosage amount gets higher," he said. "The worst part is it is not a pleasant 'high.' It just makes me drowsy, and I sleep for two or three hours until the pain wakes me up again. The cycle is somewhat vicious -- pain, increasing pain, drugs, sleep, wake up to pain, increasing pain.”

The last thing I want to do is scare my mother about the risks of pain medication while she’s still reeling from post-surgery pain. She’s well aware.

All the doctors can offer her is this double-edged sword.

Meanwhile, the Sacklers await their shield of protection.

As my mom walked to her car parked in the driveway earlier this month, the toe of her Ugg slipper got caught in a crack.

She fell on the concrete. She tried to break her fall using her left arm. Her forearm snapped in two. She sat on the driveway in excruciating pain until my sister arrived to take her to the emergency room.

I’ve often heard about the risks of falling for elderly folks. But the statistics from the CDC still surprised me: Falls are the leading cause of injury and injury death for adults over 65. About 36 million falls are reported among older adults each year, resulting in more than 3 million visits to the ER and more than 32,000 preventable deaths.

Until my mom broke her arm, I didn’t realize how life-altering a fall can be for an older person. I certainly hadn’t given much thought to what we could have said or done to try to prevent it. In fact, even though my mom will be 74 in a couple of months, I didn’t think of her as “old.” She’s not the parent who I worry about falling.

She’s been taking care of my dad, who has Parkinson’s and is a cancer survivor, since the pandemic. She teaches Arabic virtually to a group of adult students multiple times a week. She’s social and runs their errands and can cook amazing meals. My mom has a penchant for moving quickly from one task to the next.

She’s older -- but not old, I thought. These days, people in their 70s remain active and engaged, and I expected no different for her.

It would have seemed strange to warn my mom, of all people, to always wear proper shoes when she steps outside. Or to teach her exercises that help with balance and encourage her to do them daily. But now I wish I had said something. Balance tends to worsen as we get older, bones become more brittle, and the winter is the most dangerous time for falls. Women fall more often than men and account for three-quarters of all hip fractures.

When my mom got home from the ER, she reminded me that her mother had broken her hip in her late 80s and died less than a year later. Studies show that a hip fracture dramatically increases an older person’s risk of death. Even a lesser fracture can lead to a loss of mobility and functioning.

As you age, mobility equals independence.

Here are some of the risk factors that increase one’s chances of suffering a fall, according to the CDC:

-- Lower body weakness

-- Vitamin D deficiency

-- Difficulties with walking and balance

-- Use of medicines, such as tranquilizers, sedatives or antidepressants. Even some over-the-counter medicines can affect balance.

-- Vision problems

-- Foot pain or poor footwear

-- Home hazards or dangers such as broken or uneven stairs, and throw rugs or clutter that can be tripped over.

My mom underwent a three-hour surgery to repair her arm. When I saw the X-rays of her bionic arm, it looked like surgeons had installed an entire Home Depot shelf in there. She will need to be in a cast for a couple of months. It will likely take months of physical therapy to restore her upper body strength. In the meantime, my siblings are helping out and looking for home health workers who can come assist my parents. I hate that my mom has suffered so much needless pain and that her life will be upended until she’s completely healed.

We can be slow to change habits until an injury forces our hand.

I’ve learned to slow down when rushing down the stairs, to use hiking sticks when attempting a steep trail, to incorporate more balance exercises in my workouts and to pay more attention to the sidewalks when walking our dog. I regret not surveying my parents’ home and habits more carefully when I visited them last.

We’ve learned the hard way -- a fall can change everything.