Free Moving Forward in Reverse by Martin Scott, Coryanne Hicks Page B

had been shrouded in
torment, defeat, and terror. I didn’t want to think about the emotional aspects
of the day, so I diverted my attention to the technical side of the events.
    ‘What happened yesterday?’ I asked as he began gently unwinding
the bandage on my right foot. ‘Why was my foot bleeding?’
    ‘It looked like a staple came loose.’ I nodded. I had figured it
was something like that. Unlike my arms, my feet were still healing and held
together by surgical staples.
    ‘Not entirely uncommon,’ he continued, and started to chuckle
again, ‘but we sure had to close it right quick.’ I wondered what part of that
statement was meant to be funny. Perhaps I had missed some inside joke in my
severe-blood-loss haze yesterday.
    ‘You lost a lot of blood,’ he said, sobering up. The cause of the
chills: I was bleeding to death; draining dry.
    I cleared my throat. ‘Why does the right foot look so different
from the left?’ I asked. The dissimilarities had bothered me since my first
bandage change. While my left foot was cleanly cut through the middle of the
arch with a small flap of extra skin used to sew it up, the right was a
mutilated stump that was so short it was hard to tell where the heel ended and
what was now the front-end of the foot began. The skin had patches of hair and
looked like someone had taken a meat mallet to it.
    He glanced up from his examination then began re-wrapping my foot.
‘Well, the left didn’t have much tissue loss and was a straight, lateral cut
and sew. There was great debate about whether there should be a BK on the
right.’ He looked at me with a sideways grin. ‘Sorry, Below-The-Knee
amputation. Knowing that you were an athlete, I wanted you to have something
that you could possibly run on.’
    He thinks I could run on that? I eyed my mutilated foot with skepticism.
    ‘It was a bit of a long shot, but I stripped the tissue and
padding from the bottom of your foot then recreated that portion with a
four-by-six-inch strip of muscle from your abdomen and skin from your thigh.
You’ll probably have hair growth on the sole of your foot now, but at least
there’s a bottom to it.’
    I laughed. It was all I could do. The whole concept was absurd and
yet here was this plastic surgeon who had accomplished it. When faced with the
possibility of amputating everything below the knee, he instead chose to build
me a foot from a medley of other body parts a la Dr. Frankenstein. Here stood
my mad doctor.
    After a moment of shared joviality – tinged with lunacy on my part
– Dr. Mixter straightened from his wrapping and said somberly, ‘There’s no
guarantee that it will work, Scott. You may still lose the lower leg.’
    I was slower to return to a serious mindset, but eventually his
words struck home and I let out the last of my laughter in a deflated huff. So
the battle still wasn’t won. Well, that was the lesson to be taken from
yesterday, wasn’t it? Don’t get comfortable; you’re not out of the woods yet.
The fight isn’t over. Heaven knows when it will be.
    Dr. Mixter left my room after mumbling something about how the
foot looked good but I was barely aware of him anymore. What he had said rang
far deeper and truer than he probably knew. It was the mantra of my new life: No
guarantee. You may still lose.  

9
Go Kick Some Ass!
     
     
    Regardless of the progress I made in the weeks that followed, all
I could think about was my team. Like chasing a rainbow, no matter how much
ground I covered, they remained tantalizingly out of reach. Having designed it
myself, I knew their schedule by heart and spent each match day anxiously
awaiting news from the confines of my hospital bed. As thrilled as I was to
know they were advancing in their season – we were at the top of our conference
and ranked in the national top 20 – it killed me to be so far from the action.
Nothing – not even the hooks – hurt my spirit more than the ache of perceived
abandonment.
    Kathy was my