My unfortunate but oddly cheerful sister-in-law has just had part of
her right leg removed, a “below knee amputation” necessitated by complications
from diabetes. The amputation didn’t
come as much of a surprise. She’s never
been healthy, and has long been enormously, dangerously overweight, hence the
diabetes. Inevitably she has never been
much of a walker.
Along the way there have
been a few moments of optimism, generally coinciding with periods of weight
loss, times when she could, with difficulty, get around, but increasingly she’s
had to use a wheelchair. In recent days,
even when she managed to get out of the chair, walking was scarcely possible
since her feet were had no feeling in them, nerve damage being a prime symptom
of diabetes. It’s extremely hard to put
one foot in front of another if you can’t feel where those feet are.
However, now that her
foot and part of her leg have been amputated she’s got some feeling back. Yes,
in the absence of parts of her actual limb, she has developed feelings in their
phantom versions. Just another of
nature’s little black jokes.
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