Losing an arm
Journalist Miles O’Brien lost his left arm in February. He wrote about the experience and what he’s learned from it so far for New York magazine.
But here are two things you need to know about life after an arm amputation: First, your center of gravity changes dramatically when you are suddenly eight pounds lighter on one side of your body. Second, while my arm may be missing physically, it is there, just as it always has been, in my mind’s eye. I can feel every digit. I can even feel the watch that was always strapped to my left wrist. When I tripped, I reached reflexively to break my very real fall with my completely imaginary left hand. My fall was instead broken by my nose, and my nose was broken by my fall.
Lying on that sidewalk, moaning in pain, I reached the end of Denial River and flowed into the Sea of Doubt. It finally dawned on me in that instant that I was, indeed, handicapped. That may not be the term of choice these days — “differently abled” or “physically challenged” may be de rigueur — but as I touched my bloody face, feeling embedded chips of concrete in the wounds, “handicapped” sure seemed to fit.
The woman I was passing on the sidewalk when I fell took one look at me and cried out in panic to her husband: “My God, what’s happened to his arm?” “It’s gone,” I said. “But don’t worry, that didn’t happen today.”
O’Brien also mentions he’s tried mirror therapy pioneered by V.S. Ramachandran, which I’ve written about previously.
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