He suffered from a seizure disorder, he told me he’d run out of medication, and experienced a seizure. I will never forget what he painstakingly told me – his voice so soft I had to strain to hear him as he relived the parts he could remember. With his limbs tightly wrapped and his scars hidden from view, I couldn’t quite believe them either.Īs I sat on his bed, we spoke about what had happened to him on the day of his hospital admission. He couldn’t yet see the surgeons’ handiwork, so he couldn’t believe my words. His stumps were bandaged, and covered by a thin yellow blanket. I remember how he kept blinking, as if it could not possibly be true. Gently, I explained that his legs had been badly damaged by the cold, and that they had been too injured to save – so doctors had to remove them both. I remember sitting down on his bed and holding his hand. I remember the exact six-bed room he was in to this day I remember his face. When he was brought back to the ward, he was still sleepy and confused from the anesthetic, and a little while after that, a nurse paged me to say that he was awake and wanted to know what kind of surgery he’d had – the surgeon had spoken to him in the recovery room, I was told, but the patient did not remember the conversation. That morning, he went into the operating room when he emerged that afternoon, he had lost his legs to amputation. He had suffered a horrific case of frostbite so severe that parts of his lower extremities had become gangrenous. I was in my first few years of independent practice there, on shift as the ward’s attending physician, and one of my patients was a man in his early 40s. Just over a year before his horrific 2008 death in the waiting room of Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre, I met him in that same hospital.
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