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Walter Altland woke.  His leg hurt.  He felt down over it and bumped into the top of the cast.  He raised the sheet and looked under it, his leg was still there.  He remembered his wife coming in after he got back from surgery.  She told him his leg was fine.  He could see his toes, he wiggled them, his leg still worked, at least some of it.  As he was getting acquainted with the attachment to his appendage Dr. Douglas came in.  “Hi there, how are you feeling today?”

“Tell me doc, am I going to lose my leg?”

“Walter, your leg is fractured.  There was some bone loss due to fragmentation so we put in a pin to hold the bone until it recovers.  But lose your leg, not likely.”

“What do you mean not likely?  You mean you may have to take it off?”

“I can come up with things that could go wrong that might result in you losing your leg but nothing that has any likelihood.”

“But the women, they got shot and they lost their legs.”

“Yes.  The bullet that hit their legs was an exploding round.  It went in and exploded.  It blasted the area of their leg so bad that it was impossible to fix.  A couple of inches of the bone were pulverized.  Worse, vascular structures were destroyed.  With your leg, the damage to the vascular structure was limited to one small point at the wound.  That will heal.  The bone damage was significant, but I have seen dozens of worse injuries that we treated with good outcomes.”

“So you think I am going to be fine?”

“I can’t promise that but there is nothing I can find that indicates you have any real risk of losing your leg or function.  I’m going to have you go down for therapy today and tomorrow and unless you spike a temp in a couple of days you are out of here.  Give you six weeks or so at home and we take off the cast, then a couple of weeks of therapy and you are going again.”

“You really think so?”