Sat in the consultants office.
The leg is infected, hot, red and swollen. The metal prosthetic rod that ran through the entire leg had now broken through the shin bone. It was a mess.

“Go home, dial 999, it has to be amputated within 24 hours or you will die.

It was 2021 in the middle of Covid, I was blue lighted into a hospital in chaos. By that point I’d had over 20 surgeries on my legs, 3 sepsis infections, 3 knee replacements in that leg including an antibiotic spacer, lost all my quadricep muscles on both legs, eventually having my right leg fused. It was going to make amputation very difficult, they had to drill the bar out, had no quadriceps to wrap around and with the sepsis infection my chance of survival was slim.

Waking up in recovery with a leg missing was traumatic, every day I still wake up thinking I have 2 legs until I remember I have one missing and I still go through the same trauma.

I had tubes everywhere, IV fluids, anti biotics, drains and catheter. Covid meant I couldn’t have visitors and the wards were packed with the sick and dying. The day staff were as helpful as they could be and the night staff were ‘bank’ and didn’t care at all. I saw some awful things.

Home and life had to be heavily adapted and had to come to terms with a missing leg. When I was younger and was asked if I would rather lose a leg or die, without hesitation I would pick ‘die’ and in many ways my life has been curtailed now anyway, and how do you pick die? It would mean doing it yourself and leaving both a physical and emotional mess for others to clear up.

The weird thing is due to the surgical difficulties I have permanent phantom pain, neurologically I still have the leg and it hurts, particularly around the ankle and foot, yet I can’t touch it. I still try to move it out the way and use it to scratch the other leg. My other leg is heavily compromised so I can’t use that either and have now been a permanent wheelchair user for 4 years.

When I had my final blood tests later in that year to check for infection they discovered I had cancer, but that’s another story….