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Patients who underwent amputation were always angry if it took them from ambulatory to working on being ambulatory. Little kids handled the change significantly better—often because what they had before weren’t quite limbs. An amputation made them ambulatory.
But some people, before the amputation, were in constant pain. When the moment finally came they expressed relief—and even gratitude to their doctors. It was a moment of hope.
She’d been in constant pain for two months. She couldn’t get out of bed and had been stuck first on a catheter and then with a bed pan that nurses she used to flirt with would empty while avoiding eye contact. She only slept when Callie took up the chair beside her bed and held her hand—and even then it was restless sleep.
She was trapped. She couldn’t rest on her side. Couldn’t get in a chair and wheel around the hospital. All she could do was lie inert and wait for the infection to heal and the pain to go away.
One day Alex came with greasy hawaiian pizza and an apology and she stared at him as she tried to will the ill feeling consuming her away.
Then she woke up.
She woke up with Callie watching her.
And she woke up with her leg hurting more than it ever had before in her life. Like someone was trying to twist it off at the site of the break but only after they’d peeled all the skin off and plucked out her toe nails.
Callie was still watching her. Failing her. Failing to find words.
She looked down and this funny little lump of flesh moved when she tried to tilt her leg. It wasn’t even half as long as her leg should be and moving turned the whole limb on fire.
The whole limb that was no longer there.
Callie was holding her hand and trying to say something. Trying to explain how she’d failed Arizona. How she’d ignored Arizona’s one request. How she’d taken everything from her.
“Get out,” she said over the blather. She couldn’t find many words. Couldn’t find many thoughts. Could only feel the anger and the pain. But she still managed to infuse her words with venom. “I said get out.”
Callie was still watching her. Pitying her. Like she had the right? Like she could say anything? She wanted to. The way her mouth hung open limply. Worked worthlessly to find something to say.
“I swear to God if you don’t get out of this room Callie—“
Her mouth snapped shut and she squared her jaw like the protector she’d promised to be. “I’m not leaving you.”
Too late.
“You left me the moment you cut off my leg.”
The words didn’t wound Callie nearly enough. Yes, she stepped back. Yes ,she looked shocked. But how could she possibly hurt as badly as Arizona?
“Now,” she growled through a clenched jaw.
So Callie left. Abandoned her.
She fell back against her pillow, not even realizing she’d been sitting up. Tears tugged at her chest but nothing came out at first. The pain was too immense to even be vocalized. Her mouth hung open mutely.
She glanced back down again. Hoping the dream was over and the pain was in her leg.
But it wasn’t. It was all just phantom pain. For a leg lost. For a life lost.
####
Callie was shaking but she couldn’t let anyone see it. And she couldn’t let them into Arizona’s room. She shut the door—having made sure the shades were shut as soon as she’d gotten there. It was the only privacy she could salvage for her wife.
She sat in front of the door with her butt on cold tile and her ear pressed against the wood and she closed her eyes and prayed that the hysterical sobbing she now heard filter through the door would disappear.
That she’d close her eyes and it would all be back to normal. That Mark would wake up and Arizona would be her wife again and not the miserable creature who might have killed her just now.
Squeaking sneakers nearby forced her to crack her eyes open. But it was just Alex, who took a seat opposite her and said nothing.
They were in this one thing together. Married by the violent act they’d committed against the woman she loved.
She’d ordered it like some despot. Demanding he take her leg. And he’d done it. Butchered her wife’s body and soul so that she might live. Cut off a piece of her and conferred it to an incinerator that would turn infection and flesh and bone and that mole behind her knee to ash.
That was the worst. She’d been buried in Derek’s hand and she’d focused on it so fully. Given herself over to his case in the hopes it would eradicate the procedure being performed on her wife from her mind.
But Callie was an orthopedic surgeon. She’d been doing amputations as soon as she’d had a scalpel and she knew every cut. Every slice. So when she stepped out of surgery she threw up. Not over nerves for Derek’s hand. But because she kept seeing her wife’s severed leg wrapped up and thrown into a bin for biohazardous waste.
It wasn’t “the leg” that she needed it to be. It was her wife’s leg. One she’d kissed and caressed and stroked. One she’d fought so fucking hard to save. One she’d lost.
And with it she’d lost the woman she loved. Now there was just a ghost sobbing on the other side of the wall.