One of my characters is an agile and skilled fighter with a short blade, but needs both her lower legs amputated above the knee. With prosthetics, what difficulties or differences would this cause to her fighting ability?
Hoo boy. Weâre not medical professionals and havenât done a lot of research into prosthetics or their effect on combat. A lot of it is going to rely on the available technology in the setting and how good the prosthetics are. There are paraplegics who train in martial arts, run martial arts dojos, and teach others self defense. So, if itâs something you really want to pursue, Iâd suggest doing extensive amounts of research.
But sheâd have to learn an entirely new way of fighting. The feet, the ankles, and the lower legs handle our mobility, our weight adjustment for strikes. Fighting relies on footwork, not just for speed and agility, but to be able to perform complex strikes at all. It would take her years of work to be able to recover her fighting ability and she would never really achieve the level of prowess she had before in a competitive sense. Thereâs a huge difference between being able to defend yourself from an untrained combatant and a fight between two professionals.
This is just on the physical level and doesnât touch on the psychological struggles that sheâd face. Athletes and injuries arenât a good combination, they have a habit of pushing to hard to fast during recovery and often injure themselves more. Someone that has been used to high levels of physical activity will face significant struggles when theyâre suddenly forced to stay in bed for six weeks, when they canât get up out of bed without help, when an orderly has to help them go to the bathroom, when their wheelchair (which sheâll need while sheâs learning to use the prosthetics) wonât fit inside their house because the specifications werenât built for it, when they canât climb the stairs, when theyâre looking at six or seven months of recovery and have to watch all their friends going off to do the things they used to do without them.
Could she retain enough mobility to continue in her current line of work? Probably not, unless youâre working with a futuristic setting. Sheâs going to have to figure out what else she can do with her time. I suggest looking up Oracle Year One by John Ostrander, before the New 52 reboot, Oracle was the most well known disabled superhero, you might be able to pull some inspiration from her journey and her transition into a different kind of superhero.
Hereâs a personal story that might be helpful to you:
When I was twelve, I broke my left leg. I was training for my first degree black belt test at the time, that day our instructors were teaching us the tornado kick. Itâs a jump spin kick where you perform a roundhouse, spin into a turn and perform a followup jump roundhouse. Do it fast enough and you start to turn sideways in midair. Anyway, it was on my third try, Iâd finished the first kick and as I went into the spin, I felt my foot get caught on mat. My leg stopped moving but my body kept going, there was pain and then I was on the floor. I tried to get up, but my leg gave out like there was nothing there and I fell down again. I remember saying âI canât walkâ. It took two instructors supporting me on either side to carry me to the bench. My parents werenât there and my mom didnât arrive until the end of class, fifteen minutes later. One of the adult students gave me their jacket to use as a pillow, they took it back when they were leaving about five minutes before my mom came.
My master instructor carried me out to the car and my mom took me home, this was before cell phones. I waited in the car outside our house while she talked to my dad. Then, she took me to the emergency room where they put me in a cast and sent me home in a wheel chair because I didnât know how to use crutches.
Our house isnât ground level, every walk way into it has stairs. My room was on the back end of the house on the second floor, up a set of very narrow steep steps. The hallway leading back to my room was not wide enough for a wheel chair to fit. So, I slept in the guestroom in the front room for two months before my surgery. The guestroom was the only bathroom in the house with a standing shower that could fit a stool for me to sit on while I bathed. I wouldnât have been able to take a shower in a tub and even with my leg wrapped in plastic bags to protect the cast (and later the external fixator) it would have been hard to take a bath. The shower didnât have a handrail, so if I slipped and fell, there was no way for me to get back up. My wheel chair could not fit inside the bathroom, so I had to support myself by gripping the sink and the wall to the towel rack while hopping on one leg to get into the shower. Then, I had to sit on the toilet while my mom wrapped my cast up in a plastic bag. I also had to sleep on my back with my foot elevated on a cushion, I couldnât roll over, and I couldnât turn to find a more comfortable position in the bed.
My leg itched constantly.
For the first two weeks or so at school, people were very nice to me. They constantly offered to push my wheelchair from class to class, carry my books, hold the doors open for me, etc. After that, they stopped noticing, stopped doing nice things, mostly forgot about me. Iâd always been a bit of an outsider, the weird smart kid with ADD but the difference between a mental disability and a physical disability is that you canât hide from the physical one. People will see it and they will react to it: pity, disgust, curiosity are common. Mostly they donât look at you, or when they do, theyâre condescending to you, trying to be helpful without really being helpful like holding open one of the double doors instead of both and not really getting out of the way (youâd have to turn the wheelchair on a diagonal to get through and they were standing in the way). If you donât take their help with gratitude (even when itâs not helpful) they get upset.
Things people say and do when youâre disabled that are really annoying: they use the handicap stall even though theyâre not disabled and there are other stalls available, especially when they take the stall right in front of you because theyâre ahead in line and didnât see you, they tell you how lucky you are that you donât have to participate in PE especially when all you want to do is to participate in PE, they ask to take rides in your wheelchair, often in inconvenient places such as while on the tennis courts, complete strangers ask to see your injury because their friends told them about it and when you show them they go âewww, thatâs gross!â. When someone takes your crutches and hides them outside the classroom because they think itâs âfunnyâ. When people are nice to you because youâre in a wheelchair. When people think you canât do anything for yourself because youâre in a wheelchair. When people think your mind got broken the same time as your legs because youâre in a wheelchair.
Things that are really annoying about being in a wheelchair: traveling between classes feels like going a few miles, you notice every crack and uneven piece ground, a slight diagonal in the ground feels like Mount Everest, having to roll all the way around a building to find a ramp, when a building doesnât have wheelchair access, having to sit at the back of the class, having to get a new locker lower to the floor because you canât reach your old, cherished one, not being able to go get a Christmas tree with the rest of the family and having to sit in the car while they go pick, having to sit in your wheelchair while other people bring you the presents even though that used to be your job. Having to wait for someone to pick you up and drop you off, because you canât get home by yourself anymore. Not seeing the inside of your own room for two months because youâre in a wheelchair.
It all adds up and itâs a huge change in your life. Everything you once took for granted is gone and you have to find an entirely new way to live. If youâre really serious about having your character be a paraplegic, these are all things that you have to consider seriously for your story. Itâs ultimately what the story is going to be about: finding a new way to live against the backdrop of who you used to be and what you used to do but canât any longer.
I donât know if thatâs helpful, but itâs what Iâve got.
(I should probably point out also this happened when I was twelve, I spent an entire school year in a wheelchair and then on crutches. I'm twenty-six now, but I still double check every building I walk into for wheelchair accessibility.)
