The Young Amputee

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"The Young Amputee" The time is 9:32 p.m. here at St. Joe Medical Center where I am a nurse assistant on the orthopedic floor. I have just been asked to assist a nurse with a dressing change. This isn’t just changing a band-aid to a scratch on a knee type of dressing change. I am assisting in a dressing change to a thirty-year old female named Kathy that was hit by a car as a pedestrian. Kathy was pronounced dead at the scene of the accident and later revived in the emergency room. Doctors were able to save Kathy, but not her left leg. She is now a below the knee amputee. To prepare my self for this task, I have to wear protective clothes which consists of: a white hair net, an airtight orange facial mask that looks like a duck bill, a long sleeve bright yellow lab coat, rubber gloves and blue foot protectors. This gorgeous ensemble will protect Kathy and myself from infection. Did I mention that I look like an over-grown duck? As I open the door and enter Kathy’s room, what smells to be the odor of a dead and rotting animal carcass consumes my lungs. Tears are beginning to well up in my eyes and my stomach is feeling like it is going to erupt. Kathy has a severe infection in the remainder of her leg. What I see before me is a beautiful young girl laying flat on her back, fast asleep in her bed. I pull the sheet back from across her body and to my surprise what is left of Kathy’s leg has no bandages covering it. Broken bones, red muscles, blue veins, white tendons and yellowish fat cells are visible. Her leg is left open because there isn’t enough skin to close wound. There is also a gaping hole the width of a soda can and about eight inches deep running down next to the tibia and fibia bones in the middle of her leg. It looks as if someone slapped a few pounds of raw ground beef in the middle of her bed where the rest of her leg should be. The nurse tells me that my only job is to hold up in the air what is left of Kathy’s leg so she can debreed the inside of her leg. This isn’t going to be easy because Kathy’s leg weighs at least seventy-five pounds.

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