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THE LONGER ROAD – Thankfully, the two young boys who hit us head-on were shaken, but fine. Stephanie’s hip, and the purple and black bruises she sustained from her seatbelt, fully recovered in a few weeks. My road to recovery would be a bit longer. Unable to walk, or even to bear weight on my broken right leg, I lived on a hospital bed in our family dining room for three months. By then, I was eligible for a prosthetic left leg and strong enough to stand for a few seconds at a time on my healing, but still broken right leg (see photo right – standing for the first time). Pain would announce, and x-rays would show, that the 21 breaks in my right leg and foot (heel, ankle, and tibia) would take three full years to fuse and heal.
People ask, “Gee, Noel, how long did it take you to recover?” On reflection, I believe amputees are like recovering alcoholics – recovering for the rest of our lives, but never achieving recovery. We are always adjusting, learning, dealing with issues, like numbness, pain, lesions, the ever-changing shape of our residual limbs (stumps) requiring new prosthetic fitments, etc. Amputees are in a constant state of recovery.
Read More: A New Surgery – Targeted Muscle Reinnervation (TMR)
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