Waiting For an Arm and a Leg (PopSci.com) {IW vet amputees }

[eppur_se_muova]

The next generation of artificial limbs—fused directly to human bone and commanded by the brain—promises effortless, natural motion. It can’t come soon enough for the newest group of prosthetics wearers:?U.S. soldiers

By Suzanne Sataline | July 2006

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Then you graduate and, because you’re an action junkie thrilled by weapons and foreign cultures, you’re assigned to run a military police station outside Baghdad. One morning before sunrise in June 2004, you’re bumping along in a Humvee on a routine patrol when someone aims a rocket-propelled grenade your way. It’s a lucky shot. The bomb tunnels into the carriage, shears off your buddy’s arm, and blasts through your own, making spaghetti out of tendons and muscle. What the insurgents don’t get, the surgeons finish off, leaving you with nothing below your shattered right scapula but expectations.

You’re 24, a child of the computer age. When you wake up and learn there is no more right arm to write and eat and shoot jumpers with, you just know that the country that invented supercomputing and reconstructive surgery can give you something gleaming and spectacular. An arm to rival Will Smith’s appendage in I, Robot.
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The two women bonded in frustration. Stockwell, 26, received the microprocessor-enhanced C-Leg but struggled for months to walk free of pain, wishing that the large silicone socket holding what she calls her “little leg” wouldn’t chafe or thrust to the side, broadcasting her limp. Halfaker was the lone female soldier with what’s bloodlessly called a shoulder disarticulation, her right side barren like a sheer cliff. Prosthetists fit her at first with a partly mechanical, partly battery-powered arm held on with a thick plastic socket that fit like a shield and was Velcroed around her body. The device worked with muscle power; when she shrugged, pulleys and cables would trigger the motorized arm to open a blocky claw. It was a prosthetic born out of a previous war, uncomfortable and clumsy, and made her feel like a Playskool toy—and she let the prosthetists know her displeasure. “I don’t want an arm that weighs 20 pounds. I want an arm that weighs three pounds,” she told them. Something that wouldn’t slow her down. She was offered a hand that was a hook, a device straight out of the post–World War II weepie The Best Years of Our Lives. Absolutely not. “Because,” Halfaker said, “it looks like a hook.”

And that was it. There was no Plan C. For Stockwell, there was no leg and socket that would allow her to stride quickly and pain-free, that didn’t leave raw, angry marks on her pale thigh. For Halfaker, there was no arm that was strong and nimble and light enough that she could slip it under a silk blouse. Stockwell persisted, learning to walk in her new mechanical leg, though with a noticeable limp. She adapted. Halfaker rebelled, left her arm in a heap in her room. She learned to wash, dress, drive, and run with one arm, her empty sleeve dangling by her side. She adapted too.


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more: http://www.popsci.com/popsci/medicine/34f7cd8e5620c010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

A reminder of the human cost of Bu**sh**'s War, also known as W's War, or Dubya's War, or The War Started by the Republican Party, or The PNAC Invasion of Iraq, or The Right-Wing Radical's War, or Dick and Dubya's Excellent, uh, War. Sometimes misleadingly referred to as "The Iraq War", as if Iraq had started it.