Word: armfuls
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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After medic Billie Grimes stopped the bleeding with an elastic cord, I was rushed in the humvee to a nearby brigade clinic and then medevacked to a U.S. Army hospital elsewhere in Baghdad for surgery to clean what was left of my arm and the shrapnel wounds in my right thigh. There, I learned that everyone else in the back of the humvee had survived, though Jenks had serious leg wounds, Beverly had knee and hand injuries and Nachtwey had taken shrapnel in his knees and abdomen. The next morning, a middle-aged nurse with blond highlights approached...
...course of the next week, I spent at least an hour a day working on the Myo-boy, graduating to new levels of virtual reality. Finally, I simulated the mechanics of a virtual hand, including the wrist rotation I had paid for with two extra inches of my arm. It took an extra step, hitting both muscles at the same time...
...wide open, no more so than my new friends who had honed their bodies for a completely different cause: war. The military represented the perfect synthesis of muscle and discovery, a place to play out feelings of invincibility. Now they confronted the world from a wheelchair or without an arm. Life looked different with no war to fight, orders to follow and comrades to love. The question was how to fill the void, and with what...
Three weeks of hospital life had taken a toll. I was 20 lbs. lighter, stooped, and as pale as a death-row inmate. Lacking a hand and 3 in. of forearm, my right limb hung almost a foot shorter than my left, the length of a child's arm attached to an adult's body. In a light-green hospital gown, I wasn't groomed for the runway or my date of Jan. 2. My girlfriend, Rebekah Edminster, had flown in from California for a 10-day stint...
...arrival of my myoelectric arm in the first week of February was more exciting than a new pair of shoes--but no more comfortable to wear. Just getting it on was painful: my stump was still incredibly tender. If my former right hand had floated lightly, the fake one moved like a dumbbell--fat, clunky and heavy. Its 2 1/2 lbs. were concentrated in the electronic hand--the place farthest from the half-forearm. I kept bumping it into things. I named it Ralph, after the clumsiest kid in my grade school...