My New Leg

Sadly enough, I haven’t had much of a chance to try out the test socket yet. I’ve been busy and it takes so much mental energy and focus to think about what a leg feels like, that it’s fallen by the wayside during the past week. It’s difficult to just wear it un-selfconsciously; I feel compelled to concentrate on how the foot feels, how my gait appears, and so on, which turns into a full-time endeavor.

But today I gave a presentation at my older daughter’s preschool on my new leg, which was a lot of fun. Occasionally, a parent comes into the school to talk about something of interest just before “circle time”. It gives the kid a chance to stand at the front of the preschool class with their mom or dad (usually, a mom, I suspect) and help present something neat to their friends.

In another ten years, Lila will probably be horribly embarrassed when Dad shows up at school with a bag of feet and pops his leg off, so I figured I should seize the opportunity while I can. Now I’ve given talks about prosthetics to all sorts of audiences — media, public, health care, academic — and have never been shy about it, but the idea of talking to a crowd of 4-5 year olds turned out to be surprisingly scary. Children are not only curious but brutally honest. Adults are curious about prosthetics and other people’s bodies, too, but have years of training to not ask personal questions. Kids just fire away, which is refreshing but can make you feel quite vulnerable, too.

So I found myself sitting on a piano bench in the corner of the preschool classroom, desperately clutching my 4 year-old’s hand, facing down a rather large crowd of 2-5 year olds. Figuring this wasn’t the usual parent presentation, Lila’s teachers had alerted the principal, who had invited the entire preschool and all the teachers. Yikes!

Lila first explained my motorcycle accident to the kids, who asked the usual questions: did it hurt?, why did the doctors cut your foot off?, and so on. I’ve noticed that children have trouble conceptualizing amputation. They’ve all had scraped knees, cuts, and bruises, but the idea of a boo-boo so bad that it encompasses an entire limb and can’t be addressed with a band-aid is difficult to fathom.

Then she pressed the lock button and helped me take the leg off. I pried off the footshell so the kids could see the internal structure of the foot, and we passed the parts around the class along with an extra silicon liner I had brought. Meanwhile, I was peppered with “ooohs” and “aaahs”, questions about how it worked, and requests to repeat the performance so they could see how the leg attached to me and how, exactly, it worked.

I’ve noticed that people — not just kids — see my prosthesis as a replacement leg, which makes perfect sense. But it’s harder to see how it actually works. As one child asked, how do I make it move? Although prostheses are, strictly speaking, replacements of body parts, prosthetic legs function as extensions of the most distal joint. My prosthesis is an extension of my knee.

Although my prosthesis replaces my foot and ankle, I control it and feel it through my knee. This offers some advantages but isn’t quite as proprioceptive as one might want. For example, I can feel terrain through my knee, and the tactile feedback no doubt helps me walk on uneven ground. But, on the other hand, I dislike driving stickshift because I find it so tiring to “feel” the clutch through my knee instead of my foot and ankle.

Among the questions, the most unusual was “what did they do with your foot [after it was amputated]?” I don’t think anybody has ever asked me this. I haven’t thought about this in years, but always assumed it was cremated and dumped in a bio-hazard landfill, but I found a more delicate way to phrase this for my answer.

Kids also connect things in amazingly creative ways. When I mentioned how much my new leg would cost (approximately $8,000 to my insurance company), one child mentioned that her Dad had lost his keys and was mad because they had also cost a lot of money to replace.

I had brought along the two feet I’m supposed to be testing out — the Trias and the Vari-Flex and presented them to the kids as the “soft rocking chair foot” and the “bouncy spring foot”. The smooth rollover of the Trias felt like a rocking chair and the Vari-Flex is, well, kind of bouncy, so the descriptions seemed apt.

I asked which they would prefer and the vote was unanimous for the bouncy spring foot, the Vari-Flex.