Blog #4 Working the Scene

Diabetes is a slow persistent killer.  It took my grandfather from us one piece at a time.  I was in elementary school when he lost his first leg to gangrene.  The blood wasn't circulating in his foot and leg properly anymore.  The diseased tissues were slowly dying.  To save his life he would have to lose his leg.  The surgeon cut off my grandfather’s leg just below the knee.  He sawed through skin, muscle, tendons and ligaments to prune away the dying tissue like my dad pruned the weeping willow in the backyard.  The one with the tire swing.

My grandfather comes to visit us after the amputation.  Scared and excited, I want to see what his artificial leg will look like and how the stump of his leg will look.  I picture flesh torn apart like a raw chicken being prepared for dinner.    

Grandpa Ed sits in my dad’s lazy-boy chair in our small living room and my little sister, Sarah, and I wiggle as we sit on the floor at his feet.  He looks almost normal sitting there with his brown cotton pants covering the artificial leg.  His real foot rests flat on the floor, but the artificial foot angles up unnaturally.  His pants are rolled up slightly revealing the sagging sock on his artificial leg.  Grinning, he pulls his pant leg up and reveals his new leg.  The fake leg is molded in the shape of an actual leg, peachy pink like the piglets at the County Fair.  The leg is smooth, but not hairless.  He’d drawn black hairs all over it with marker. 

Sarah and I cover his leg with stickers and he jokes about letting us tattoo him.  He shows us how he takes his new leg off and puts it back on. The leg is incredibly heavy.  The actual stump remains a mystery.  It’s covered in athletic bandages and a sleeve of some spongy material that provides a cushion between his stump and the leg. 

He loses his second leg a couple years later.  We visit my grandparents in Buffalo Gap, South Dakota that Christmas.  He is still recovering from the surgery and stretches out on the couch with his latest stump propped up.  I plop down in the space his leg used to fill and he swings the stump over as if his phantom leg were in my way.  His artificial legs no longer look anything like legs.  They’re metal poles with toe-less feet to fill his shoes.  They’re much lighter.  I miss that first leg, but it isn't there anymore, instead it hangs as a conversation piece in the Buffalo Gap bar.  I hope it’s still covered in marker.