How I Lost My Left Foot

It’s March 15th, a Sunday.

I will later remember that it’s my mother’s birthday, and that I forgot to call her.

In my defense, I had a pretty good excuse. I’ve been throwing up for days, and the antibiotics I took for the “ulcer” in my left ankle aren’t working.

My wife and son are supposed to have gone on vacation yesterday morning, and I encouraged them to go, which, in retrospect, was a bad idea. Had they gone, I would have died, Full stop. No joke, no exaggeration,

I don’t remember much of the day, because the infection in my left ankle, or rather the two infections in my left ankle, at war with each other, have taken the collateral damage of the rest of my body with them. I am feverish, disoriented, and I can’t even work my phone to give my wife the insurance ID card information necessary to navigate a telehealth appointment.

I have refused her increasingly less polite requests to go to the emergency room to deal with this obvious emergency up until now, but, seeing as I can’t even get up off the couch, my protestations are getting weaker,

In a last ditch effort to try and avert a hospital visit, I take a shower, which has always been a resorative experience. In this case, it makes me feel as if I might die. Literally. After the shower, I get out and lay naked on the bed, and that’s all my body will take.

I am done.

When my wife discovers this, there is no more argument. We go to the emergency room. Getting into the car, I am too weak to lift my legs over the threshold of the door, and I can barely talk.

This is where my memory gets a little spotty.

We are in the emergency room for quite some time. There is a woman next to me that I will later find out has broken her arm. She is moaning in pain, nonstop. I am as thirsty as I’ve ever been in my life, and there is no water to be had. We are there for what seems like an eternity, but which I will later find out is more like two hours.

My wife gets into an altercation with the triage nurse, because she is so very scared that I’m going to die in the ER, and when we go back, finally, is given one warning to avert being thrown out.

I think this is maybe the sexiest thing I’ve ever heard.

The next period of time is a little sketchy. I don’t remember a lot, except being wheeled down the hall, during which I passed out.

The next thing I remember is someone holding a clipboard in front of my face, containing consent forms. I find out that this is much later. I can’t hold a pen, and so they ask me to verify that my wife has my consent to give consent.

We are very consent-driven at this time.

There’s also a word that creeps into the conversation, one that cuts through the rest, and, though I am mostly unable to figure out what is going on, that one sticks with me.

“Amputation,” the doctor said.

That certainly couldn’t have applied to me, I thought, even in my haze, though I knew somewhere deep down that it did.

The next thing I know, I’m waking up in the ICU, and am very thirsty. From the look on everyone’s face, I can tell that it wasn’t a given that I would do that, and so they look relieved.

For my part, it was like I fell asleep and woke up without a foot.

The next two days are kind of a blur. I was allowed ice chips only for a while, which did very little to sate my thirst. Also, they would swab the inside of my mouth with a sponge that felt a little like one of those little paint brushes you’d get at Michael’s. It really did nothing but make me thirstier.

Finally, on what must have been my 2nd day in the ICU, a really, really nice nurse named Justin asked me if I wanted a sandwich.

If you know me, the fact that I could only muster about two bites should give you a pretty good indication of how weak I was. Chewing seemed a monumental task.

After a while, when I was more aware, I got the whole story. They told me they were going to move me to a room, which might take a few days. It ended up taking all of two hours.

And that’s how I ended up spending St. Patrick’s Day with my dad, who had flown in from New Jersey, my mother-in-law, who flew in from Colorado, and my wife, in my new room, in an all-new bed with a sort of air-pressured mattress (highly recommend, but it’s weird, so it takes a little getting used to), and without a left foot, cut off about six inches below my knee.

My son, when he came to visit, immediately did two instantly memorable things. First, he wanted to know what they did with the foot, I assume he thought it would be in a jar on the mantle there in the hospital,

Second, he named my stump Jimmy.

And, so, this is how I will be referring to it during the course of our time here.

—

There’s more to the hospital/rehab stor, and it’s a narrative we’ll revisit a lot.

First of all, I’m ok. We’ll get to how over some time.

Second, it’s really important to me that this blog be positive, and instructive, and that you might take something from it aside from my sob story.

But here’s the most important thing:

I survived and am ok and sitting in my house, alive, with my wife and kid, and my dog and two cats, and I have beautiful friends and a family that I love dearly, and that love me, which is the most important takeaway from this whole thing.

Others are not quite so lucky. The hospital and rehab and doctor visits can be scary even with all the support in the world. Without, I can only imagine how hard it would be,

So, every post in this blog will end with the same thought.

If you have it in you, please give a thought to donating time or money to Hospice Austin. They do amazing work for people who are going through the hardest thing a person can face.

—