Afterword
epidural form is usually used now, but in former days a full spinal was given, and this could cause the most drastic alterations in body-image, the sense that one terminated around the umbilicus, and that everything below was stony or waxy, unreal, unalive, in no sense part of one's own living body. Back in the Casting Room, years before, when my alienated left leg was first removed from its cast, I saw it as "exquisite, lifeless, like a fine wax model from an anatomy museum," and this was how both of my legs looked now, reflected in the mirror above the operating table. I observed the surgery with a sort of aesthetic pleasure, and a sense of complete disengagement and detachment; it was not my leg that was being operated on, but a sort of dupl~足 cate which had nothing to do with me. With the right leg, there was not the huge contusion and edema there had been with the first injury; there was no sign of any gross injury to the femoral nerve. Surgery was altogether easier and more straightforward, and no more than two hours elapsed between the first and last stitch. Further, I was given a walking cast, and instructed to stand and walk on the leg, the very next day. This was in marked contrast to the fifteen days I had been immobilized after the original surgery, the fifteen-day limbo spent in wheelchair or bed. The next day I did stand, and clutching a walker, took a few steps, the whole stress of my weight being borne by the cast. Half a dozen feeble steps, that was enough-but enough to show me that the frightful situation of ten years earlier had not recurred. I was terribly weak, but I knew how to walk; the leg felt part of me, there was no hint of alienation. It was easy now, back in bed, to work on the leg, to tense the quadriceps, to build back the muscle; easy, standing on my good leg, to swing the operated one at the hip, swinging it this way and that, keeping all the muscles in 185