Congratulations on Saving the Leg!

Medicine has come a long way since the Civil War, but we’re not here to tell you that. Your instructors at Bob Jones School of Medicine were trying to for years and that never got through to you, so why would you listen to us now? A decade of “effective practice,” most of which consists of removing slightly injured limbs that might one day become infected and calling it good, has taught you that people in the Smokey Mountains will believe just about anything and endure just about anything as long as it doesn’t shit talk NASCAR or comment on their meth habit.

But lately you’ve been feeling like you’re not challenging yourself enough. You’ve been saving most of your patients by removing the few limbs they have left and warning them about the danger of foot rot when they mention that they haven’t been changing their socks of late, and that’s really been keeping your incoming patient numbers down.

So today when a young man comes in with a gunshot wound in his leg just below the knee you’re going to look at it, consider removing it and cauterizing the wound with a flaming hot machete and calling it a day and you’re going to say, for the first time in your career, no. Not today.

You’re going to pull that boy’s leg up on the table, remove your bullet probe from its velvet case and determine the depth of the bullet’s wound. When you hit the bullet and push it into bone a little, prompting an agonizing wail from the boy, you’ll know that you’re on the right track. Then you’ll insert your narrowest calipers into the wound, prompting another series of jowls from the child, which you’ll answer with a bottle of moonshine pressed into his hand. Once his mouth is stopped by the bottle’s mouth you’ll delve back in and pull out part of the musket ball that his uncle shot him with.

“Almost done,” you’ll tell him, patting him on the thigh. He’ll wince, but the shine’ll be taking hold and that’ll help him keep quiet while you fish out the other two pieces. Once you finish your probing you’ll take the shine from him and pour it down the wound. The boy will squirm something fierce when you do it, but he’ll be so off his gourd at this point that he won’t make a peep. He’ll just lay there, eyes fluttering just on this side of consciousness , while you wrap a cotton bandage around the wound.

When you wheel him out in the barrow to his momma you’ll give her directions: change the dressing twice a day, morning and night, and pour shine into the wound to kill what’s growin’ each time. She’ll nod and chew her lip and when she leaves she’ll go with a smile, blackened gums and gray teeth shining at you before she hefts the wheelbarrow and hobbles off on the peg you left her with after that mule kicked her in the uterus however many years after her son was born.

You’ll watch her go and feel a swelling in your heart which, as it turns out, will be symptomatic of a much bigger pulmonary issue which will kill you a decade from now.

Congratulations on Saving the Leg!