“My Stump,
My Stump, My Stump
My Lovely
Lady Stump (Check it out!)”
One of the ways in which I’ve
always entertained myself and others – ok, mostly just myself – has been
singing popular songs while intentionally mangling the lyrics. I think I
inherited this talent from my mother, though her lyrical mix-ups were anything
but intentional. My personal favorite was her take on Barry Manilow’s most
heart-wrenching of love songs. You know the one. “Oh, Mandy, you kissed me and stopped me from shaving . .
.”
“Why
would someone write a song about that?” my mother asked one day. “What’s so romantic
about bothering someone while they’re trying to shave?”
Flash
forward to the early 1980s, to a warm spring night in Chicago. I was on a
double date with my college roommate, sitting in the passenger seat of a guy’s
convertible as we raced down Lake Shore Drive. My big hair whipped around in the
wind. The radio blasted out some awesome Tom Petty. And I stretched my hands
overhead and sang, “No baby,
you don't . . . have . . . to live like an amputee!” Big laughs all around.
Yeah, well,
irony’s a bitch. As I’ve discovered – the hard way – if you want to continue
living after you’ve lost one or more limbs, then you really DO have to live
like an amputee. You’ve got to find a way to keep going.
With that in mind,
I think it’s time to get all Dr. Phil up in here and address the elephant in
the room: My “stump.” The detail-oriented among you might have noticed that in
all these essays I haven’t turned to that word to describe what remains of my
left leg. Nor have I described in detail what my leg now looks like. I think
it’s time.
Like all
relationships, the one I have with my chopped-off leg has evolved over time. While
hospitalized, I refused to look at the strange, misshapen bandaged blob that was
once my sturdy, muscled leg. I was horrified and disgusted by the nothingness
of my knee, my calf, my ankle, my foot, and my manicured toes. Whenever doctors
or nurses had to change the bandages of my open wound (and later my skin graft
site) I would put a sheet over my face and squeeze my eyes tight. I couldn’t
look at it. I did try a few times, but I felt sick and started trembling with
grief. Honestly, it gave me the heebie-jeebies to even glance down at that alien
thing, the swollen, mummy-wrapped rump roast dangling lifelessly from my left
hip. I decided if I didn’t look at it or touch it, maybe it wouldn’t actually
be there. Because, really, there was no way that thing belonged on my body.
Clearly, there’d been some sort of mistake in the unfolding of the grand scheme
of the universe.
I wasn’t supposed
to be an amputee. That was for other unfortunate people who had endured motorcycle
crashes, cancer, a crushing avalanche, or stepping on an IED in Fallujah while
serving in the Marine Corps. Not someone like me. I didn’t ride motorcycles. I didn’t
have a serious illness. I didn’t climb mountains and I wasn’t in the military.
I was a divorced, middle-aged, romance-writing mother of teenagers living in a
small town in Maryland. Losing my leg wasn’t even a radar screen blip in the control
tower of my normal little life.
It
happened anyway.
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Lounging with R.L. in snowman PJs |
On good days, I’d joke around with doctors and visitors, saying that if they thought my leg looked bad they should see what I did to the shark. (Humor is my go-to coping mechanism.) We even talked about getting a custom T-shirt made that said, you should see the shark. My real feelings weren't so entertaining, so I decided to keep them to myself. Who wanted to hear that I would never – ever – accept
the ugly, disgusting, useless thing that was once my left leg. Period.
For additional
yuks I started a contest among family and friends to come up with a good name
for it. Yes, “Stumpy” was a favorite. As was “Shorty,” “Sharkey,”
“Peg,” “Lego,” and “Legolis.” (Get it? “Leg-o-less?”) My son wanted to name it
“Bob.” Since none of those seemed to strike a chord with me, I decided I’d hold
off on a name. I figured I’d know it when I heard it.
But all this was
just distraction and for the benefit of others. I went on secretly being disgusted by it and scared of it, right up
until about a couple weeks after I’d been home. That’s when my physician ex-husband,
John, came over to help me change the bandages on my skin graft, and . . . .
(I really must
interrupt the flow of this essay to say that, yes, there is a story to be told
about my quasi-friendly, post-divorce relationship with John, and someday I’ll get
to it. But now is not the time. For now, just know that he was helpful and kind
during this ordeal. I was grateful for his personal and professional assistance,
and made sure to tell him so. But that story has more than a few twists and
turns, and it will remain a tale for another day.)
Anyway, so John
came over to the house to help change my bandages. I needed his help because
the home care nurses couldn’t be there every day and I was too
freaked out to do the job myself. On that particular day he carefully spritzed
the site with sterile saline solution, applied a wrap of non-stick gauze
followed by one of standard gauze followed with three elastic bandages. After
he was done, he sat in a chair near the bed and told me the whole story.
I almost lost my
entire leg, up to the hip, and there was even a time when my orthopedic trauma
surgeon was prepared to amputate the hip itself and part of my abdomen.
I was stunned. My
ears buzzed and my head felt like it weighed five hundred pounds. What? I wasn’t sure I heard
John right, so I made him repeat it, with all the details.
John explained that
the bacterial infection was quite far gone by the time I reached University of
Maryland’s Shock-Trauma Unit. Despite the big-time antibiotics and repeated surgeries,
the necrotizing fasciitis continued its death march up the inside of my thigh.
But Dr. Robert O’Toole chased the infection inch by inch in his effort
to salvage what he could. He went back many times, cutting away more dead
flesh, bone, and muscle with each procedure. But he did it. He kept it from spreading. He saved my thigh.
So that’s what all
those jagged, shark-attack scars were?! They were the reason I still had most
of my upper leg and would one day be able to walk with a prosthetic?! At that
moment it dawned on me that Dr. O’Toole had performed a miracle, that the thing
I hated and didn’t want to admit was part of me was, in truth, a miracle.
After John left, I
sat quietly and stared at the bandaged thigh, overcome with wonder, relief, and
grief. At that moment, I took my first tentative step toward something other
than self-hatred and denial. I felt my heart begin to soften. I realized that
it could have been a lot worse. I could be dead. No, I should be dead. And I could
have no leg at all, no hip, and nothing left of that side of my abdomen.
Given these alternatives, I actually began to feel grateful for “it.”
That was the moment I
named my leg. I suddenly remembered how I had laughed a few days earlier when
my friend Pete, the medical equipment supplier, referred to it as “the residual
limb.” I couldn’t help but be amused by the politically correct euphemism for
“stump.” We had a winner!
I decided on R.L. for short. (Even its name was amputated.) I began to talk to it. I thanked it. I gently
patted it and held it in my hands, understanding that only the inside and underside of the thigh was mangled – the top and outer thigh were perfectly smooth
and free of scars. After that, I began to change my own bandages. And I even started
to take tiny peeks at it, figuring I needed to understand everything that brave
and strong leg had been through.
Slowly, I began to
see R.L. as a symbol for all of me, my own battered and scarred but miraculously
surviving self. I stopped thinking of it as “it” and knew in my heart that if
R.L. was part of me, she was a “she.” It would be months before I dared hold up
a mirror to my shark attack scars and more than a year before the sight didn’t
make me nauseous and panicked.
These days, R.L.
is a trusted friend. She doesn’t hurt much at all. She’s healed flawlessly, and
I’ve never faced any additional surgeries, which is quite unusual for my kind
of ordeal. She’s given me no problems with bone spurs or broken skin. Knock on
wood. And she has the joint and muscle strength to allow me to stand and walk
using my prosthetic leg.
R.L. is a survivor. She’s a warrior. She's a bad-mamma-jamma.
She
is me.