cuts but was otherwise intact. She had done more damage to her hip in a fall while hiking.

“Don’t try to move it in any way when it’s unwrapped, let me do that. I don’t want you to strain any of the work we did. It hasn’t had time to heal yet.” He took the rope from her left leg and hooked it over a pulley directly above her chest. Then he turned to the nurse, “Put the weight back on and add

another twenty to hold it there.” He held the leg till the nurse added the weight.

Kathy felt her leg being pulled up toward her and for the first time she could see the end of the stump. A gasp came from her lips. She had never seen the end of an amputated limb before. Even if she had, hers was so different the experience would not have prepared her for it. A hollow steel shaft protruded about an inch from the end of her leg. The rope was attached to it by a clamp.

“I know that’s a shock to see. We fixed your stumps so we can reattach your legs later. In doing that, we also gave you a better platform to attach a prosthetic till your own legs can be attached. Do you want me to explain it now or do you want me to wait till your parents come in?”

“No, tell me now.” She really wasn’t sure she was ready for this but she needed to know now.

“Like I said, we found the damage to your knees was much greater than we expected. The nerves were just gone. The blood vessels were smashed. We couldn’t reattach with our new method. It replaces the crushed bone and blood vessels but doesn’t do anything about the nerves. There wasn’t even enough good skin to work with. We didn’t have enough good skin to cover the wound. We decided to do the first half of the operation we were planning to do sometime early next year. You had signed the authorization for either surgery, something we do as a matter of routine. There wasn’t anything else we could do except a traditional amputation and I knew you didn’t want that.”

“Will I ever be able to walk?”

“Sure. You will walk with artificial legs and in the next couple weeks. With your own legs, nearly for sure a little further out in the future. I don’t know if you will be able to run but you will be able to hike and maybe be able to jog. Let’s see what we did. Your legs were amputated about six inches above the knees. We made the stumps match at a level where we had good tissue on both of them. Your lower legs were done in another OR. The team there removed the damaged portion of the legs to about three inches below the knee, and prepared them for reattachment. Essentially they were prepared like your stumps. The top of your lower legs look like these stumps except they’re smaller. They were put on infusion to keep them till we were ready.”