The Stump

Four years ago, apparently what loomed large in my mind was the stump, what it would look like, what it would be like, and how I would deal with it.  Part of all marriages is physical attraction, and for most people, stumps are just not attractive.

I should probably mention that his leg was ugly to begin with.  The accident that ruined it happened long before I knew him, so I have always known him as a man with an ugly leg.  That never kept me from loving him, and I knew that the stump would not, either.  But still, my reaction to it worried me.  Would I gasp when I saw it and hurt his feelings?

In the early days, I did all I could to avoid it, to avoid seeing it or even thinking about it.  I had to help with bandage changes, and as long as I focused on the wound and not the limb, I could handle it. It made me laugh that after all my years of avoiding the medical field, I had become someone's personal nurse.  It has never been the gore that bothered me about medicine, it is the caring, and since I already did care, I could handle the duties.

It took me a while to actually look at the stump without focusing just on wound care.  When I did, my worst fears were confirmed.  It was ugly.  To me, it looked like a ham attached to my husband, but a ham that could move.  The way it moves offends my sensibilities, as if it is something from a horror movie.  The other end of Thing, perhaps.

At the same time, looking at it confirmed that I could handle it.  As ugly as it is, I have never looked at him and been horrified that he no longer has a leg.  He is still Doc, still my husband.

Anniversary

It was four years ago yesterday that my husband went in for surgery to have his leg removed.  There was nothing easy about the decision, but then, there had been nothing easy about keeping the leg that had been mangled in a motorcycle accident more than 30 years earlier.  The timing was horrible for me; I was in my last semester of getting my Masters in Architecture at the University of Florida, a grueling program that required long hours and complete dedication.  However, I could hardly ask my husband to wait after all the pain he had been in since the last failed knee surgery.

We went into it knowing that I would likely have to put off my graduation for another semester.  I informed my advisers that I might have a difficult time finishing on time, which was one of the hardest things I have ever done.  My whole life, I have been proud of always doing everything on time, or even early.  I hate the idea of being late, or spending more time finishing something than I have to.  However, I had experience with working on my degree during previous surgeries, and I knew that this would be the hardest one yet.

My husband went through counseling to ensure that he would be ready to take this step.  There have been a lot of negative news stories about the VA lately, but there are things they are very good at, and they have a lot of experience with losing limbs.  It is entirely possible that he did not listen as well as he could have to the counseling, but he was ready for this.  If only there had been some counseling for the rest of his family.  Perhaps I should have sought some out for me and the kids, but I really had very little time to even think about it.

The surgery itself went fairly smoothly.  The initial recovery went smoothly, although as I thought, it was impossible for me to keep up with my thesis work, and I did put off my graduation.

Now, four years later, it seems like we have littered those years with broken dreams.  I have a degree, but still no job as an architect; he has made little progress in his desire to run a marathon.

Still, I think we are better off for it all.  Those dreams may never come true, but we are infinitely adaptable in our dreams.  The dream that has come true is that he is able to go about his day in less pain.  His shoulders don't ache all the time, his back is not as constantly in spasm, and he has no more pain in that knee at all.