No surgery…

The surgery to amputate my right leg, which I’d hoped would have happened by now, clearly isn’t going to, not least because my surgeon has chickened out (while absurdly trying to blame me for “changing my mind”). That is simply not true.

My view is that he doesn’t want a patient who, by his own admission, is likely to die on him, not from the surgery, but from post-op pneumonia brought on by being confined to bed in the giant Petri dishes they call the Bays! There’s another problem too – if I’m confined to bed my muscles waste so fast the loss is visible pretty much daily, and I can’t let that happen.

I have, though, been overtaken by events, and if they had taken my leg off, I’d now be in deep shit. A few weeks ago my previously healed left leg swelled prodigiously, sprouted a monstrous blister, and burst. Fast forward to this weekend, and that’s now an ulcer in its own right.

So surgery – and NOW I’ve changed my mind! – is off the agenda.

I felt that I could cope with just one good leg, my wheels and crutches, but unless my new ulcer heals, and based on the experience of the existing one on my right leg which, for all practical purposes, now completely encircles my leg, that’s unlikely, the left leg, too, might well become a candidate for amputation, and that’s just not going to happen.

I’m probably better off with two malfunctioning legs than none at all.