The shape-shifting bone growth along with the tenderness of my skin and weak muscles made it hard to pinpoint what fixes needed to be made with my sockets. All I knew was that it hurt. This caused me to get recast for new sockets almost twice a week. Each Monday, a prosthetist would wrap my legs in the wet papier-mâché material and take the molds back to make new sockets. By Friday, those sockets hurt so bad that I couldn’t even put them on. Was it because my legs were changing? Was it because I was swollen? Was it because I was sore from yesterday? Were these new sockets too tight? The hardest part was that the people making the prostheses weren’t amputees. None of them could understand how or why it hurt; they just took our word for it and went into the lab and tried again.
After my third week in a row of really awful pain in my legs, I looked at my physical therapist and asked, “Just be honest with me, is it always going to hurt like this? Am I just going to be in this much pain for the rest of my life? These things don’t ever feel better; they just hurt differently.” He confirmed that many of his patients dealt with weeks of pain before the prostheses felt right, but I did not have to just accept whatever sockets I was given that week. While it was going to be a grind, walking should not feel like torture every day. I needed to get more in tune with my body and figure out what discomforts were helpful in breaking in my stumps and which were unacceptable pain that required adjustments to my sockets. I suddenly understood that all of this was a process. At this stage, it was not about making prostheses fit; it was about toughening my skin, strengthening my muscles, and forming my legs to the shape of a socket, not the socket perfectly forming to my leg.
Until this realization, my process had been do PT, go home, swell up, try on sockets that were too tight the next day, do PT anyway, get blisters, get sore, squeeze into them the next day, do PT until I cried and the blisters ruptured, throw the prostheses in anger, take the weekend off, and do it again the next week—all while still holding on to the parallel bars, not even independent enough to walk with a cane yet. My amputee friends were all I had. Knowing someone who was just a few weeks ahead of me would confirm that if I just hung in there and communicated better, the sockets would change along with me. All my friends said there would be a lot of adjustments when figuring these things out. Sometimes I got blisters because the knee was too heavy, not because the socket was too tight. Sometimes the pressure on my shin came from my foot being tilted too far forward. Sometimes my sockets were too tight because I had eaten too much salt. When I tried to cut the salt and hydrate more, my legs shrank!
Getting prostheses was the hard pivot in my recovery. It required my full ownership. Up until this point, the people who took care of me may not have understood my pain, but they knew what to do to help me. There was no cure-all for mastering prostheses, and no one who made prostheses, fixed prostheses, or helped amputees walk in prostheses knew what it felt like. For the first time since I arrived at Walter Reed, my mom and my wife could not speak for me.
I had to separate the gradual buildup of calluses, aggressive shaping of my muscles, and hardening of my flap from the pinching, rubbing, and pressing. My friendships were crucial, because even though I had a physical therapist and a prosthetist watching me walk, sometimes it took the voice of a fellow amputee saying, “You look like something’s pinching you in the right leg,” for me to say, “That’s it! That’s the problem.”
CHAPTER TWELVEOUTPATIENT
“At that time I will gather you; at that time I will bring you home. I will give you honor and praise among all the peoples of the earth when I restore your fortunes before your very eyes,” says the LORD.
—Zephaniah 3:20
PAIGE
Despite the sharp learning curve with prostheses, other exciting things were happening: We were finally moving to Building 62… for real! We had a real room assignment and everything. Josh’s recovery from the infection sidelined him from all activities for a week. But we were held up from life at Building 62 because of the wound vac that was still trying to heal his back. Our doctors told us that wound vacs could not go to outpatient for fear of malfunction or damage. Josh was pretty upset about that, but personally, I was grateful. We kept the wound vac for twenty-three days, then immediately requested another shot at outpatient. On September 5, we packed up our inpatient room and high-fived the entire hallway—I’m sure they were ready for us to go, too. Although the move to 62 was exciting, there was another requirement that we didn’t foresee: Josh would be officially assigned to the Warrior Transition Battalion, which means he would not be part of the 1-23 Infantry Battalion A Company Earthpigs any longer. It was time to play Army again. Josh was assigned a cadre that he was accountable to every day. We were required to check in with a squad leader every morning to let them know that Josh was awake. Then we had to physically check in with them at some point during the day, usually to complete tons of paperwork. Josh was told about two months after we arrived at Walter Reed that he was not physically eligible to deploy. I was not surprised to hear this news,
