The amputree

I was crutching in Valley Forge National Park earlier today and came across this tree. I wondered if trees have phantom pains when limbs are removed like I've been having since my right was amputated at the end of February. It'd be awful for them if they did.

Amputee videos

Josh Sundquist.

As you'd imagine, there are many YouTube channels featuring people who, like I, have lost a limb. They have great advice. 
The best one for me is Josh Sundquist, who, like me, has lost a leg. Most of his videos were done about nine years ago but they're still useful. Another is Megan Absten. She lost an arm in an accident when she was fourteen and now seems to be around twenty. Her methods of physically coping are ingenious, but what I watch her for mostly is her attitude and how she's mentally coped with her disability.
The problem with both of these is that they're young. Josh is a can-do, bright, optimistic man now in his early thirties. He can go up a flight of stairs faster using his forearm crutches than anyone using only legs could. If not for his loss, he'd be a competitive skateboarder or something, and for all I know he's that too already. 
I, who will turn sixty in a few months, watch him and wish I had his ability.

Megan Absten.

Then I realized how misplaced my envy was. Misplaced to the point of being stupid, actually. Josh, who lost his leg to a cancer similar to mine, would surely envy me for having had two legs decades longer than he had. Granted, my right leg wasn't much of a leg—it was seven inches shorter than the left—but I walked, climbed and bicycled many miles with it and did lots of things I doubt I'd have done without it, like backpacked in countries where there were few amenities for the handicapped. 
I feel like I owe Josh and Megan an apology but of course, for bad thoughts you can apologize only to yourself.

The surgical site

Friends and family are being very kind since I returned home last week after the amputation of my right leg five days before that. They want to take me out to dinner or bring meals to me. 

A Philadelphia view from a swanky 15th floor doctor's office.

Unfortunately, I'm not as I appear. The surgical site (for some reason I balk at calling it my "stump" but I guess I won't after some time) is a bundle of raw nerves, a drain, and many black stitches pulling on red skin. It's hard for me to sit still for longer than a few minutes before either the site hurts or phantom pain or sensation does. I may look like someone who would rather do nothing other than sit and eat and watch TV, but when I'm not lying down trying, futilely, to get some sleep, I'm up and about, sweeping floors, vacuuming, things like that. 
I'm eating well enough, but I wouldn't say I'm enjoying meals, and eating with people I like wouldn't change that much. I've never been good at declining invitations gracefully (at my best, my degree of sociability has always been well below average) but I'm working extra hard on doing so now. I don't want to get pigeonholed as a grouchy amputee, best avoided.   

I'll be an amputee in 24 days

Is that word, "amputee," all right? Or is it like "lame" or "cripple"? I have no idea. Maybe I should be saying "one who has lost a limb" instead, but I'm one of those who tries to use fewer words rather than more. Oh well. When it's about you, you can say what you want. A few years ago I volunteered for an organization for the blind and all the blind people I knew there called themselves blind.
The wait at the cancer center yesterday was a long one, over two hours, and I'm a smart phone hold out, so I didn't have a screen to stare at like nearly everyone else does these days. So I sat up straight, closed my eyes and meditated for a bit.
Even though I knew the final test results would be bad, only confirming with lab results what the doctors and I already knew, there's always that little ray of hope you have that they'll come into the examining room with embarrassed smiles, smacking their foreheads and saying they goofed, that everything's fine, now get the heck out of here and back to your life!

A jetliner heads west on an East Coast winter evening.

That, of course, did not happen. My right leg will be amputated on February 26. My doctor said he could do it the nineteenth, but I demurred. The more time I have to mentally prepare, the better.
Here's the oddest thing about yesterday. I was certain that morning that when I got home after getting the news firmed up I'd pour myself a stiff drink. But I didn't. In fact, I didn't even have the seven-ounce beer with dinner I usually do. I also didn't take the anti-anxiety medication I've been taking for a few weeks, and I slept fairly well. 
I can speculate why this is true—knowing and accepting reduces stress, and all that—but really, I don't know why I feel this way. Your guess is as good as mine.

Last leg

This man is not the Loser.

If the Complete and Total Loser's bone sarcoma comes back, his doctor said, amputating the leg might be the best way to minimize the chances of it taking root in his lungs, which will kill him within a year. The way the leg is and where that would occur is too high up to make a prosthesis practical. The Loser would spend his remaining years on crutches. 
He despises being on crutches. You can't carry anything when you're on crutches unless you put it in a backpack. You can't push a shopping cart so you'd have to go to a big store that has those electric carts you drive around and those aren't in all stores. 
And people with missing limbs spook most others. Yesterday, the Loser saw a man with one arm running. He saw the man peripherally at first. Something in his subconscious registered as not being right, so the Loser instinctively turned his head to look at the man full on. He looked away quickly and smoothly, but his own life with a big shoe has taught the Loser this: The man noticed.