Word: paines
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...Phantom pain was a daily topic at OT--occupational therapy, the whittling porch for amputees. I made my first friends there. Most of my neighbors were half my age and from different backgrounds, small-town boys who had passed up college or blue-collar trades for a military life. I was urban, overeducated, untattooed and distrustful of uniforms and blind patriotism. But I soon discovered that I shared something with those soldiers larger than the differences in our biographies. We were men struggling for identity. The psychological scars of amputation ran deeper than those from conventional wounds...
...tone in OT could shift from laughter to grave silence in the moment it took a soldier to scream in pain or explode into anger. Captain Katie segregated the angriest amputees. Her morning sessions bristled with tension. Metallica and Motorhead blared from speakers. One specialist who had trouble picking up a peg with his above-the-elbow prosthesis flung the $115,000 device against a wall. "I ain't doing it anymore," he shouted. Another threw the metal pedal of his wheelchair into a costly exercise machine...
...marked the passing of a year since my injury. I knew I'd never regain what I had lost in penmanship, tennis, home repair, lovemaking, freedom from pain and dexterity. Even putting on a tie remained a challenge, one fraught with danger. Rushing to a TV appearance a few weeks earlier, I tried to knot one in the backseat of a taxi. I gripped the short end with my prosthetic hand, which began to spin uncontrollably, almost strangling me before I managed to extricate myself...
...heard about Jim, who apparently delivered McDonald's shakes and burgers several times a week. He was one of the angels of Ward 57, a special breed of patrons who brightened up a day otherwise filled with surgery, needles, bad food and pain. The angels usually arrived in the quiet times. Doctors weren't making the rounds. Metal meal wagons had stopped clanking, the traffic of institutional do-gooders from the Red Cross and veterans' groups temporarily halted...
...would quickly learn, Jim had a feel for combat amputees no doctor could match. He was one of us, having lost both legs to a land mine in Vietnam. He had lived through every stage of recovery and knew what we were enduring beyond the pain: identity crises, loss of self-confidence, and fears about supporting ourselves and attracting the opposite sex. Jim passed along biofeedback tips - he called the process "mind f---" - for combating the jumble of severed nerve endings called phantom pain. He coached families on the need to validate their loved ones' suffering, pulling them into...