My Pain Baby

 I just looked at photos I took of myself to send to a doctors office a week after my August 3 operation, when I was concerned about my incision, thinking I'd use one to accompany this. I demurred from using most; they are repulsive. I'm down to just one thing coming out of my body; an aquarium-like tube that goes deep into my stump, exits via a hole on my pant line (thanks for that, doc!) and then goes for twenty-eight inches to a silicon bulb that sucks bad blood from inside the operation site. I safety pin the bulb to my T-shirt and drain it three times a day and measure the foul-smelling fluid. When the amount drops to a specific level, I can have it removed. To someone who's never had such a thing, it wouldn't appear to be a big deal, but from past experience, I can tell you that when it's removed I feel like a dog let off a leash on a big field filled with wonderful things to sniff and chase.

The pain continues with only a fifteen percent or so reduction five weeks after the operation. My stump remains swollen, as hard as a melon, warm to touch, and part of the lengthy incision has an open wound I clean and dress every morning that seems to look worse each day. 

I crutch the short distances—bed to kitchen or bathroom, back—through the house where I live alone slowly and with much care. This is also true the two times a day I go outside to get the mail and fling beads of food into the koi pond in the backyard. The caution I exercise is due to the tenderness and ever present burning pain of the stump. I've started calling it my pain baby because I behave toward it as I would to a newborn I'm carrying over a treacherous surface. I never had children of my own, of course (see blog title), but a few friends have entrusted me to hold and carry theirs in my two-legged days, and when I did I did so in a similar way.