Phantom Limb Syndrome

2. Chloroform by any other name would smell as sweet

The blast came from nowhere.
An air raid wrongly aimed. I heard it and was thrown forward. I tried to stand but I screamed in pain. I can't stand. The thought reverberated in side my skull like a bullet that had lost the velocity to puncture an exit wound and instead tore my brain to the thin soup they gave us for dinner rations. My first rationalization for the blinding pain that torn through my body had to be that my hip had been shattered. I wasn't dead. That was the second thought that clouded my head. I knew I had lived, but I couldn't stand. I fell onto my back and screamed for help. Or at least I believe I screamed, I was not sure my mind could string together anything beyond the two facts that I could not stand and that I was mostly sure I was not dead yet. I must have made some sort of sound or scream, finding the strength deep inside some primal instinct that was clawing for survival. Wright heard me screaming and he came running. I think he might have thrown up when he looked at me because I remembered seeing him double over, coughing, and shouting. He seemed like he was down a hallway or a tunnel and I couldn't remember where I was. I thought I was outside. But how could Wright be down a hallway?
He stepped forward, but my sight had all but dimmed to a cinema screen before the film began. There was a pain in my leg that was so excruciating that I couldn't even cry. My sight had quickly progressed past a rim of red and black spots. Something was very wrong. I was practically blinded, but the horror in Wright's face was too obvious not to register in that same instinct driven part of my mind that was struggling desperately to survive. Wright screamed for help but it sounded like he was walking farther and farther from me and I begged him to stay with me. He said something about my leg. And it took two men to help me stand. The medic put me on a stretcher and I screamed when they moved me. Oh god! That pain... I finally sat up enough to see what was wrong, I wished I hadn't. The lower half of my leg was gone below the knee, blown clean off. My thigh was stabbed all the way through by a metal piece of shrapnel. I screamed purely at the sight; my leg had been blown off. I came in and out of consciousness after that and my body seemed to float.
"Moran!" Wright yelled. "Moran! MORAN!" He cried my name over and over but I never gave him more than a moan of response. I was bleeding out fast.
As soon as we got to...

I don't remember where. I'm not sure how long it took no us to get "there" or where "there" even was. All I remember was the pain. They wrapped my leg in gauze, trying to stop the bleeding. I flickered in and out of consciousness and I was fairly certain I was flickering away at life. I was white as a ghost and not far off from becoming one. I couldn't tell if the shrapnel was still in my leg or not. All I knew was that if it was, I needed it out. Now. My whole leg hurt with a sort of white hot pain that made me think it would never go away. If I didn't die of blood loss I would surely die from the pure amount of pain.
Wright never left my side. He kept himself awake what I assumed had to have been all night. I'm not sure if I was lucky or not that the medic train had come the day after my accident because that meant I had to endure that pain longer.
My memory on that ride is scattered and I think I should have difficulty recording it accurately. So I chose to leave it out of my account. All I remember is pain, and I chose not to remember that pain.

I was unloaded at the first hospital stop and rushed inside. I was laid on an operating table and I screamed when the doctor tried to chloroform me. I was terrified that I would never wake up from that sort of medicated sleep. And if I had endured this for so long, I should think that I wished to survive past the pain. Perhaps this was all a nightmare, I tried to convince myself, and I would wake up still neck deep in mud with a pen and paper still on my lap.
The doctors had to pin my arms down so they could put me under a medicated sleep. And quickly I felt myself falling.
"Please don't let me die...." I whispered softly as I fell into a drugged sleep.