Word: legging
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...humvee bed was cold and hard, an inhospitable place to awaken. I struggled to sit up and fell back. My right leg burned from knee to hip. Blood was oozing from it; my right arm felt heavy and numb. Was I having a nightmare? The hollow, faraway sound of voices was dreamlike. I shook my right arm, trying to wake it up. Still no response. I elevated...
...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...
Among the pros on the amputees' Ward 57 at Walter Reed, no one seemed fazed by my injury. But just the word amputation made me shudder. It conjured up a disjointed series of images: a childhood friend who had lost his leg in an auto accident; World War II veterans wheeled into ballparks for holiday games, their empty trousers or shirtsleeves pinned up. I had avoided mirrors all week. Now I feared seeing the startling reality in the faces of my family and friends who would be visiting on my first day in the hospital...
...believed in the curing power of humor, especially slapstick. One of his favorite routines was mimicking awkward hospital volunteers who invariably said the wrong thing. When a leg amputee was convulsing in so much pain he couldn't talk, Jim handed him a chocolate shake and a three-by-five-inch index card with a scribbled message: "That will be $5. Bless you." But he mainly used treats to break the ice. After a couple of shakes, amputees were asking questions of the man who walked on two fake legs and worked for the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs...
...maintain their morale. Captain Kathleen Yancosek couldn't get close enough. A rehabilitation specialist known by everyone simply as "Captain Katie," she was a razor-thin blonde who almost dissolved into tears when she visited her first patient on the ward, a teenage soldier who had lost a leg in Iraq. He was crying from the pain. His mother was hysterical. The 27-year-old therapist braced herself, realizing that she was supposed to be the one whom they had confidence in to help him get better...