Word: forearms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...long stumps like mine, forearm muscles located 3 in. below the elbow drove the process. Flexing the one on the outside of my forearm signaled a hand to open. Tensing the inner muscle would close it. My first lesson with an occupational therapist, Captain Kathleen Yancosek, focused on how to isolate those muscles. Using a tool called "Myo-boy," Captain Katie strapped electrodes onto each of my forearm muscles and plugged the other end of a cord into a laptop computer. The object was to generate a spike on the monitor by flexing the right muscle. I jerked, twitched...
Five days after I arrived Ward 57, surgeons removed another 3.3 in. of my forearm. They needed an inch of bone to free up enough loose skin to cover my wound; I had agreed to lose another 2 in. to make room for an electronic component in my future prosthesis so that my artificial hand would have the capacity to rotate rather than just open and close...
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...
...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...
...make a man too easy to identify. Among the tattoos on his arms, chest, neck and leg are a series of musical notes, the kanji character for endure and a heart for an ex-girlfriend. The one tattoo he's reluctant to exhibit, on the inside of his right forearm, is of a skewer running through a bunch of severed fingers and eyeballs. "That's the one I really don't like," Marisol says sternly but with a smile...