Once Upon a Body is the first person account of Jane Buchan's long and winding journey away from quarantine and medical caging when she was two years old. At the time, her mother was also quarantined, but in a separate building and for a much longer period of time. The multiple shocks of physical separation from all that was familiar, broken attachments with her mother, father, sister, and family dog, and her unfamiliarity with the home of her maternal grandmother where she lived after her seven- month quarantine, created years of reactivity, depression, and dissociation that went undiagnosed for three decades. During the early years of her release, she took refuge in the natural world, her one constant, and in the world of story created by her newly reconstituted all-female family. Other supports would come later, but initially, it was time spent outdoors with the rhythms of the seasons and time spent indoors, listening to the music of her female relatives' exuberant tales of conflict, romance, and adventure that anchored her in her new life In her thirties, despite loving relationships with her husband and two children, this early trauma began to pulse with the need for healing. She sought professional guidance from a therapist that helped her to understand how very serious her early experiences had been. After decades of denial, the relief of understanding changed everything. At least for a time. However, it would take several more years to discover that intellectual understanding was not enough that her wise and vulnerable body carried the stories of early suffering as feelings, sensations, hypervigilance, rage, toxic shame, and a tendency to dissociate whenever she felt seriously unsafe. Because of her background as a literature student, elementary, secondary, and college teacher, and because of her decades-long use of writing as a healing tool, Jane is able to make comparisons that create context and shift perspectives to illuminate both family and cultural influences on her challenges and her triumphs. Her narrative is the culmination of her endeavor to understand and attend to her most serious wounds in order to bring compassion to her personal suffering and to the suffering of others. She hopes this work contributes to the trauma-informed movement gaining strength in mental health centres, schools, hospitals, work places, and individual families.