My One and A Half-Legged Friend

 

One day while going to work she was mugged and thrown on to the train tracks at the age of 21. The train ran over her legs and she was left with one leg and a half. After three months of being hospitalized, she was sent home to live a normal life. It was a very painful process, but she does manage to make it look normal. She is an inspiration to me.

Today she called me up to say that she fell again. Again, because she is always falling simply because she forgets that she is missing a leg. By the way, she uses crutches. She tried a prosthetic leg but due to her high blood pressure she can´t use one. That is a whole story within itself. Besides this she needs to wear heels because the only foot she has was mangled in the tracks, so she needs the heel to walk with crutches. In addition to this, she wears longs skirts to cover it all up, not that she is embarrassed, but so people will not stare. If you ask her about it, she will show it to you without fretting. Back to the call. When she told me that she had fallen, I tried to guess how it happened. Cleaning the house? Getting off the bus? Getting on the bus? All the answers to these questions were no.

Cleaning the house is up to her and she does it while she sits on a swivel office chair so she can easily move from one place to the other hands free. When I first saw this, my jaw dropped. Sometimes she falls, she forgets that she is missing a leg and gets up to grab something to help her clean and bang, she crashes on the floor. While getting on or off the bus too, she gets up and starts walking with out her crutches and ends up falling. Yes, she takes a bus to work everyday rain or shine. When she told me this the first time, I said that she had to remember that she had no leg. We figured that it was due to the ghost pain from the leg that is not there she forgets that it is in reality not there. After this, she forces herself to remember that she is missing a leg.

When I answered the phone, after all the greeting and when I finally asked her how she was, she told me that she fell while she was showering. Well, not while but as she was getting off the stool and onto a dry spot. To do this miraculous feat, she hops on one leg and holds on to the sink. Apparently, the sink has taken its toll and detached from the wall. She was thrown back to where the stool was, and pieces of the sink flew. Luckily, she was not hit but any of the ceramic pieces. Unfortunately, she hurt he mangled foot and one toe. So, she was going to spend the day with her foot elevated and resting.

In the end, we laughed. I am glad that she did not get hurt. It is great how she can laugh at herself. Mind you, she is fifty years old today, so she has been doing this since she was 21, guess that the sink had had it.

 

Written: January 23, 2021 As soon as we hung up, she sent me these pictures.

Photo by MG

Photo by MG