Machine Man - Max Barry [5]
A surgeon visited, a tall woman with dark frizzy hair and impatient eyes. Usually I appreciate impatience in a person. It indicates an appreciation of efficiency. But my head was full of bees and she talked too fast to follow.
“The debridement went very well. Often in the case of traumatic injury there’s a great deal of bone fragment and destroyed tissue, but yours was remarkably clean. You’re lucky. I had to take your femur up about six inches but that’s really nothing. Very little smoothing of the bone was required. I did a closed amputation, stitching the skin closed during the operation, and that’s extremely rare in a trauma case. Normally we’d have to leave the skin flaps open, to make it easier to clean any infected tissue. But as I said, it was a remarkably clean site.”
“What was a site?” My voice was thick. I wasn’t sure what I was asking. I just needed her to slow down.
My surgeon raised a clipboard and scanned it. Her name tag said DR. ANGELICA AUSTIN. That sounded familiar. She might have visited me earlier, when I was less conscious. Dr. Angelica Austin flipped a page. “We might look at scaling back your pain meds.”
That sounded like a terrible idea. I tried to sit up. I caught sight of my leg. I had a thigh. A thigh in a stocking. Three or four tubes emerged from areas that were patched with dressing, looping to hanging plastic bags. Between these were glimpses of something pink and black and shiny that did not look like skin but was. I was short. That was the shocking part. It wasn’t the stump so much. The stump was bad. But what was terrible was the air. The space. I had half a thigh. My knee was gone. My calf. I had no foot. I was missing an entire foot. I had kicked things with that foot and now I didn’t have it. These were things that were wrong.
“You …” said Dr. Angelica Austin. “We went through the stump yesterday. I showed you.”
“I don’t remember.”
Dr. Angelica Austin wrote something on her clipboard. She was lowering my dosage. Before I could object, she put her hand on my shoulder. It felt awkward, for both of us. “I’ll come back when you’re rested. This is the darkest point, Mr. Neumann. It all gets better from here.”
MY ROOM had windows. I could see all the way across the Gardens. At dusk, the skyscrapers flared orange. It was very quiet, this hospital. It was like I was the only person there.
I HAD four nurses: Katie, Chelsea, Veronica, and Mike. Mike was the one who bathed me. That struck me as unfair. All I’d gone through and a man sponged me. It wasn’t a big deal. It was just another disappointment. Nurse Mike was friendly. This is nothing against Nurse Mike. He taught me how to unwind the bandages without pulling out a draining tube, which was something I did once and never wanted to again. He showed me how to fasten them so they wouldn’t unwind in the night. My dressings needed changing every four hours. That’s how much I was leaking, even before you counted what came out of the tubes. It was an alarming idea. Presumably if I disconnected the saline drip, I would deflate to a husk. I was a junior high physics problem. If Charles Neumann is a human being with volume 80 liters, oozing bodily fluid at the rate of 0.5 liters per minute, how often must we replace his 400-milliliter saline bags? I felt I should have been more sophisticated than that.
The nurses were very familiar with my stump. They seized any opportunity to whip back the sheet and probe my flesh. “It’s looking fantastic,” they said. Especially Nurse Veronica. Nurse Veronica could not love my stump more. She smiled and opened my curtains and changed my bags and said it wouldn’t be long before I pulled on my dancing shoes. I knew what they were doing. They were teaching me not to be ashamed. It was a good hospital. But I was still ashamed.
THEN CAME the physical therapist. The second he bounced