My New Leg

After the casting, we zipped over to the hospital for my appointment with Dr. David Sayah to get a prescription for the prosthesis for which I had just been cast. Like I said earlier, I’m going about this a little backwards…

I’m a new patient at this clinic, so I had to sit in the waiting room and fill out out a ream of paperwork and questionnaires on my current state of health. By the time I finished, I didn’t know whether to be relieved that I don’t have tuberculosis, Crohn’s disease, rectal bleeding, and so on, or terrified that these are possibilities worth asking about.

Then I met Dr. Sayah, who gave me a basic physical exam and ran through more questions about my current health.

I’ve had very mixed experiences with physicians (some can be pretty condescending) and don’t really enjoy being medicalized, but when Dr. Sayah began asking questions, I knew we were on the right track. Physicians generally don’t know much about prostheses. Amputations are not that common, so why would they? But Dr. Sayah asked questions — why do I need a new one?, do I have a provider already?, am I having any problems with the skin on my stump? — and listened to the answers, the sign of a good physician.

Dr. Sayah wrote out the prescription based on some suggested text from Wayne: “roll-on suction socket and carbon fiber energy storing foot (below-knee)”, signed it, and had an attending physician sign it, as well. “Roll-on suction socket” refers to the silicone liner that locks into the bottom of the socket. “Carbon fiber energy storing foot” refers to a type of foot that stores and releases kinetic energy, which improves the energy efficiency of walking. Wayne suggested this generic text for the prescription so we’d have some flexibility with exactly which feet to try out.