"Debbie, this is the nurse.  Can you hear me ?  The surgery is over, you're doing fine."  I lay semi-conscious and tried to make sense of it. Nurse ?  Surgery ?   My left leg burned like fire, and the rest of me felt like I'd been worked over with a rubber hose. I tried to move my leg to ease it, but it didn't seem to work.  "You're in Memorial Hospital.  You had an accident, but now you're going to be fine.  OK ?"  Accident.  Something had happened. The last thing I remembered was crossing the street on a yellow light, then ... nothing. Whatever the hell it was, it wasn't funny.  The pain in my left foot turned to itching.  Maybe my leg was in a cast or something, that's why I couldn't move it.  I had had a cast when I broke that leg skiing a few years ago, and it felt sort of like this.  I had to hobble around on crutches for 8 weeks, what a pain. I hoped it wouldn't be that again. I tried to move my arms to scratch my foot, but they wouldn't reach.   The itching was driving me crazy.  Under the sheet, I slid my right foot over, but couldn't seem to find anything.  That didn't make sense.

	"My leg itches," I said, or tried to.  "It hurts."  Maybe I'd get more attention if I complained of pain.

	"I'll bring you something to help you sleep,"  the nurse told me.

	"Can you scratch my foot for me ?"

	"I can't do that, Debbie. I'll be right back with your medication."

	"No, please, I can't stand the itching. To hell with the rules, scratch it for me now."

	"It's not the rules, Debbie.  I'm sorry to be the one to tell you, but your leg was too badly hurt when you got hit by that car, and we had to take it off.  But you'll be fine now, I promise."

	Take my leg off ?  Me ?  They couldn't have, they couldn't ...

	There was one way to find out.  My right hand didn't work, so I put my left one on my hip, intending to slowly slide it down to my foot.  My fingers felt not a cast, but soft bandages, as it slowly dawned on me that this nurse wasn't kidding.  I moved it lower, and my leg ran out before I reached my knee. The knee that I didn't have any more.  I couldn't deal with it, so I let myself slide into sleep.



	When I woke up, I had no sense of time passing.  No nurse was nearby.  Had I dreamed it ?  My right foot slide left, but found only cool sheets.  I reached down again, and found the bandages in the same place.  No dream. 

	This time, I lifted the blanket and looked. My left leg  really was gone. It now ended halfway down my thigh.  My hand was holding a rounded cylinder, swathed in bandages. I was holding a stump.  My stump. 

	I don't know how long I lay there, holding my new stump while the tears leaked out of my eyes.  I heard a noise and looked up.  A woman was standing there in a white coat.  "Debbie, I'm Dr. Frost," she said.  "I operated on you when you came into the ER, and I'll be taking care of you while you're here. How do you feel ?"

	"Like a car ran over me and then someone cut my leg off," I replied.

	"We didn't have any choice.  You'd have bled to death otherwise.  That car nearly amputated your leg for you.  But we tied off the arteries and got you stabilized, and you pulled through.  You'll recover now for sure.  Let me tell you where we are now and what we're going to do.

	"You need another operation, probably in two or three days.  As I said, we had to move quickly when you came in, just get the leg off and get you out of surgery.  We didn't have any time to think about constructing a functioning  residual limb.  We have to do that within the next few days.  We call it a revision.  OK so far ?"

	"You mean you have to operate on my stump," I said.  My stump.  That was the first time I ever said those words to anyone else.

	"All right, stump, if you prefer.  As a result, the residual limb you now have won't work -- the muscles aren't connected to anything.  We connect the opposite muscle groups together over the end of the stump, so you can move it, and also to provide a pad of flesh to bear your wieght on it.  Otherwise you'll never be able to walk with a prosthesis.  OK ?"

	"I think so. Will my stump get any shorter ?"

	"Probably some.  That's the other reason we have to revise you. We didn't have time to check which areas of your stump have good blood supply.  If we were in any doubt at all over whether a part of your leg could survive, we left it, knowing that we'd have to come back anyway, and take it off if need be.  When we do the revision, we'll see.  I promise we'll leave as much as we can.  I'll come see you when we know the schedule."

	As she was getting up, she turned back.  "I don't usually say this, but after we finished amputating your leg, I sat down and had a good cry.  Good night, Debbie, I'll see you tomorrow."  A good cry sounded like an excellent idea.  I took her up on it.



	One thing blended into another.  The next couple days were a blur, then they wheeled me up to the OR, and the next thing I knew, I was waking up in the recovery room.  It sounds crazy now, seeing as they had already taken off three-quarters of my leg, but this time I was afraid to look. I had made a plan for how I was going to investigate my new amputation. I would move my good leg inwards and concentrate on the feeling in my remaining thigh to figure out  where it stopped meeting its neighbor. I wouldn't look 

under the sheets or touch my stump until I was sure what I had left.  But even though I knew my leg was already gone, the phantom sensation of my lower leg and foot as I lay in anesthesia twilight made me forget.  I thought it was all a dream, that I still had two legs, and reached my hand down involuntarily.  And there I was again, holding my stump, only this time it was shorter.  A lot shorter.  Where before I had at least half my thigh, now I could almost hold what was left in both my hands.  It was round, and swathed in bandages, an Ace wrap around the outside and little tufts of gauze sticking through the gaps. This was what was going to dangle from my left hip for the rest of my life, instead of my beautiful leg.

	"Did you have to take so much ?" I asked Dr. Frost, when she came to examine me that day.

	"I'm afraid that's all we had to work with. The tissue on the front of your leg was badly crushed, and we couldn't save much of it.  The back of your leg was pretty good.  So we took off what we had to on the front, then brought the back flap over the end of your stump to cover it.  And it was a little tricky to accomplish even this.  My resident thought that there wasn't enough to save, that we'd have to take your leg off all the way up to the hip.  Now that would have been too bad, because a hip disarticulation leads to all kinds of other problems -- it's much harder to use a prosthesis, even sitting down is harder.  But I showed him a trick or two, and we've got this result, which is quite good considering where we started from."	

	She saw my disbelief, and explained.  "I know that seems crazy to you, but length 

isn't everything.  What you have now, what I built for you, is  much more functional that your original stump, even though it's shorter.  I  connected up the ends of the opposing muscle groups, so you'll have good range of motion. There shouldn't be significant scar tissue formation.  You've got a good pad of flesh on the end for bearing weight when you get a prosthesis. All of your surgery is over, and now we can get on with your rehab.  You'll stay here until we take the stitches out, maybe a week or so from now, then we'll transfer you to a rehabilitation hospital. OK ?"

	"I guess so.  Not much choice now, is there ?"

	"Well, since you put it that way, I guess not.  I know you feel bad now, and that's OK.  It's a life-changing thing. There's a lot of work to do before you walk out of here.  Still, I've done over a hundred leg amputations, and I can ensure you most emphatically that life is still worth living.  Belive it or not, you'll sing and laugh again.  I'll come see you tomorrow."	



	The next morning I managed to sit up in bed, trying to get interested in the magazines

the nurse had scrounged for me. It was hard paying attention to things like Pricess Diās latest romantic woes when Iād just had almost all of my left leg cut off.  Every once in a while Iād feel a pang in my missing leg or foot.  A couple were so real that I actually lifted the blankets to look at my leg, but of course saw only my bandage-wrapped stump. Somehow I didnāt cry when I did that.  Eventually I figured out that Iād get fewer pangs if I kept my hand resting lightly on the end of my new stump, reminding my brain that the rest of it wasnāt there any more.

	That night I drifted off into one of my favorite dreams, of a trip to Hawaii I had taken a few

 years back.  On the garden island of Kauai I hiked into a jungle to a pool fed by a gorgeous waterfall.  I took off all my clothes and swam, then lay naked in the sun and made love to myself.  I started to massage my breasts, and as my nipples grew hard, I moved one hand down to my wet pussy and carefully explored, spreading my moist labia apart with two fingers while I ...

	A noise woke me up, someone on the floor calling out in pain.  I wasnāt in the sunny Hawaiian 

jungle, I was in a hospital bed recovering from an amputation.  But I did have one hand on my crotch, 

which was every bit as wet as in the dream, and my nipples stood full and erect against my hospital gown.  I wanted to scream in frustration, but my anger was greater.  I would never have wasted a good wet dream when I had two legs; Iād be goddamned if I did it now.  I tried to take myself back to Hawaii in my imagination, visualizing myself lying on the ferns, legs spread wide... No, I only had one leg now.  What about my stump ? I couldnāt move it on my own yet, but I took both hands and carefully lifted it out to the left.  I hadnāt seen it unbandaged yet, I didnāt know what it looked like, so in my dream I imagined it still bandaged, spread as wide as it would go.   How did I reach the pool ? I pictured a pair of crutches lying beside me, my new friends that helped me get wherever I wanted to go.  Wooden ones, no, too clunky looking, make them silvery metal.  Yes, there I was, now add the sun and the watera dn the birds, my excitement started to mount.  Making love to myself had been my favorite activity since I discovered my clitoris at age 11. Except for one quick check after I woke up in the hospital to see that it handāt been hurt, I hadnāt touched my pussy since the day of my accident, but everything still seemed to be there and 

working right.  I moved gently at first, teasingly, bringing out the warm wetness from inside me.  I slid one finger into me, then two, all the while rubbing my palm against my clitoris.   I strung it out as long as I could, careful to avoid jostling my tender stump, then left myself come to one of the best orgasms I ever had.  They may have cut off my leg, but I was still a woman. I could still love myself, and in time Iād come to love my new body as much as I had my previous one. For the first time since entering the hospital, I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep that lasted until morning.