Still hurts

During my two-week followup with the surgeon who replaced my shattered right shoulder last month, he said I could use my crutches again. (I need crutches because my right leg was amputated at the hip four months ago.)
"It'll feel strange," he said, "but you can do it."
I was skeptical but like many, I believed my doctor, who presumably has more experience with this than I do. When I got home I got the crutches, stood up from my wheelchair and got ready to take a step. 
My right arm wouldn't move. 
Smart arm. It knew that if I tried to take a step I'd fall down and, with my luck, break my left shoulder. 

"What has he been smoking?" my physical therapist said. It seems my doctor was going by the structural ability of the replaced joint and steel rods, which had knitted with the bones. He wasn't paying attention to the atrophied muscles, the damaged nerves, the traumatized tendons and ligaments. Instead of listening to him, I listened to my PT and got on the crutches and put small, then larger, amounts of weight on them. 
Two weeks later, feeling stronger, I took a small step. Bad idea. I didn't fall and the step seemed successful, but that night when I lay down to sleep my shoulder felt like it was on fire. What's worse is that now, seven days after that one step, it still feels like that and getting any real sleep has been impossible. I've tried pillows, I've tried ice.
"It feels like I fell five minutes ago!" I say to my bedroom. The best I've been able to manage is two hours or so of sleep at a time sleeping on my left side. Despite having a good mattress, after two hours my left shoulder starts hurting and I wake up. I pull myself into a sitting position until the pain subsides, wait awhile and try again to get some sleep.

What should you do with knowledge?

It's definite. My leg will be amputated soon, maybe within a month. I won't be eligible for a prosthesis because the cut will be too high so I'll be on crutches for the rest of my life. It's awful, being on crutches. And even once the leg's amputated, my chances of living longer than a year or so are just thirty percent at best.

A newsboy selling an extra edition of a newspaper.

I'm writing this on December 20, nearly the day with the least amount of daylight out of the year in the northern hemisphere, and I've been busy the whole day. Into the city by train early in the morning for the bad news from one doctor who said another doctor should probably be consulted about it and arranged for that to happen later in the day. I was in no mood to hang out in the city all day, so I took the train home, did a few household chores, then took the train back to the city. It's a forty-five minute ride each way.
I got the bad news from the other doctor, with more explanation, then took the train back home in the dark.
I have no one in my life except two older brothers and a handful of friends. I will tell his brothers, who live nearby, after the holidays, knowing that there's little point in telling them sooner and casting a pall over a family gathering on Christmas Day. 
I have, however, a funny compulsion to spread the news. Part of this may be because he wants the attention and the sympathy—pathetic, you're right—but another part is simply the human impulse to tell people things you know and they don't, especially when you're sure the information will provoke a strong response. "Guess who died?" people say with a wide-eyed grin when a celebrity dies. That sort of impulse.

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.