Let’s Talk about Edward’s Disability
Automail (Part 2) - Rehabilitation and Consequences
I brushed up on this topic minorally in Part 1 of my talk on Automail but I wanted to go into a little deeper to help explain the difficulties that Edward encounters with being an automail user.
I also want to restate that as with my first talk on automail, and all my other entries in the ‘Let’s Talk About’ series these are applied to my individual take on Edward and are not the be all end all.
So Edward’s journey with prosthetics starts when he’s 11 years old - so since he joins the military when he’s 12 and the series runs mainly when he’s 15 and at 15 he stands 4′11″ tall, we’re going to guess that he was roughly 4′ 5″ when he was 11 that would give him about 2 inches a year to grow. He wasn’t growing very fast due to overly heavy automail as mentioned by Dominic when we first meet him in Rush Valley.
(He also was supplying nutrition for Alphonse’s body but that’s not the point here.)
But I have also guessed that his automail as they are full steel prosthetics weigh roughly 25lbs per limb. Adding an additional 50lbs to his entire body weight.
So if we go on averages, according to https://www.disabled-world.com/ the average body weight of an 11 year old boy is 78.5 lb / Where as the average body weight of a 12 year old boy is between 67 and 130 lbs according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
That would make the initial attachment of automail would be more than half of Edward’s body weight.
And according to Center for Prosthetic Orthodontics a typical (modern) prosthetic leg weighs around 4 lbs and 8 lbs for an arm. That the weight of a natural should weigh about 1/6 of the person in question’s body weight.
That means his leg weighs 6.25 times what it should weigh when compared to modern prosthetic and his arm weights roughly 3 times. But now remember that his automail limbs are full steel so there’s going to be more weight to them and automail was generally reserved for adults. Making it for children was mostly unheard of. Also remember that Ed’s automail was supposed to be Winry’s first real project and that means there were bound to be some mistakes in the design it’s self. (Weight, etc)
So we’ve already established, that Ed’s got a tiny frame, barely any weight to him and now extremely heavy automail on each side of his body.
His rehabilitation was hard.
The entire process was supposed to take him three years to walk again and be able to move around correctly according to Pinako, but Edward challenged her with one year and she told him he’d be spitting blood.
I have no doubt in my mind that he was. I no doubt in my mind he pushed himself so hard that he was coughing blood on a regular basis because knowing Edward he probably wouldn’t stay down.
I want to point out though that he wasn’t instantly sat up with automail though, we all know this, but it was a huge choice to be made. He went from a wheelchair to a regular prosthetic leg as we see in the Gaiden / Side Story “Long Night”.
At that time he was sat up on a regular leg and no arm - and even had to use Winry as human crutch to help him walk (run in this case).
Automail was never even considered as an option for Edward by either of the Rockbells at first (mainly Pinako) because she knew the hell it was going to wreak on his body. She knew his body just wasn’t made to deal with such a thing cause of the intensity of the procedure and the weight of the limbs. Adults would avoid the upgrade to automail because of the pain it can cause and the maintenance to took to keep it in working order why would she do that to someone she basically considered her grandson?
But since we’re talking about Edward’s recovery, he couldn’t even have gotten just that regular leg until his wounds started to heal, because they would have had to wait for his residual limbs to shrink down and take the proper shape of healing. It’s common place now-days for someone to receive a prosthetic within the first 10- 14 days of their surgery but we all know that didn’t happen as Edward was a pitiful mess in a wheelchair with no limbs when Roy came to visit. The entire process of recovery from the amputation can take up to 4 to 8 weeks** and the limb will most likely be swollen for the first 4 weeks of recovery.*
[* https://myhealth.alberta.ca/Health/aftercareinformation/pages/conditions.aspx?hwid=ug3839 ]
[**https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/definition-amputation#1 ]
I want to imagine that after Roy’s visit is when Ed got the regular prosthetic. Something to get him up and around and moving because the life had been sparked again and he felt like living again.
He’d probably been down for a few weeks at this point so that means, he’s already dealing with pain and swelling and possibly reddened dry skin. His bandages need to be changed regularly and it’s important that the body moves as quickly as possible after amputation to avoid the deconditioning of the muscles. Setting in a wheelchair on a daily basis / laying in bed can cause complications such a reduced muscle mass and strength, sarcomere shortening and changes in cartilaginous structures.*
[ *https://www.physio-pedia.com/Complications_Post_Amputation ]
So while he was laying around trying to just recover and live his body was already weakening. There was no way Pinako was going to say “Okay” to something that would put as much stress on his body as automail. Not in the condition he was in. I wouldn’t be surprised if Pinako struck some kind of deal with Ed to get him in a regular prosthetic first to get his rehabilitation started because there’s other scenes in that side story that show Edward in pain just from the run from the Rockbell home to the river.
Just that run completely winded him - look at his face in the top left hand corner. This is also exhibit A of Edward pushing himself and why I have no doubt he really was spitting blood when he was working through his rehabilitation from his automail surgery.
Edward still needed help to hobble around on a standard everyday leg and I have a feeling they kept him up on it before they dared to give him automail. They had to get him doing exercises to strengthen his hips again, to get his legs moving and get him up and out of that chair.
The majority of the weight of Edward’s automail rests on his hips and his the right side of his chest / right shoulder blade as seen:
So he needed to strengthen his body considerably. There’s a reason Edward trains his body as much as he does and why when he has a chance to spar with his brother, he does. While automail is a self powered unit that functions off the electrical impulses put out by Edward’s nervous system, his body still has to withstand the pure weight of it in order to get it to function. His body can send out the signals to move his right arm all he wants but if his body can’t psychically support the weight of it we have a problem. Just as the same as his body can tell his leg to move but if his hips are ill equipped to support that kind of weight, there’s no way he’s running and jumping and flipping and doing all the other crazy shit he knows how to do; Let alone just doing something as simple as walking.
As I previously mentioned, Edward’s automail is a full steel prosthetic so guesstimates aside, it is in no way shape or form light and Edward kept his original set of automail for three years until it was destroyed by Scar.
So please remember, I said at the beginning of this his body on average should have been around roughly 80 lbs for his age. It would have made sense for Pinako to have wanted him to work on his lower body before working on his upper body because if he can’t support himself how is he supposed to work on his upper body?
That child had to have been weight training constantly.
But before they could even do that, she needed to get him up and walking again because she needed to know he could walk. It’s horrible to say it like this but Edward was lucky in the fact that his body was more or less deconstructed VS actually taken in an accident or other equally traumatic event because at the very least that meant his limbs were taken in a clean break. But Pinako didn’t know that, so she had to make sure that the limbs were even capable of having a regular prosthetic let alone something as complicated as automail.
So she put him on a step up process.
So timeline wise, the State Alchemist Exam is in October.
A) Ed and Al torched their house shortly after Ed returned from getting his certification
And Edward told her he would do his rehabilitation in a year instead of three so his year was very busy and he was either training his body or down because he pushed his ass too far. I want to assume Edward’s year looked something like this:
(I posted this in it’s own separate post you guys can see it here)
I would assume they would have had completed their training with Izumi shortly after the war ended and they would have committed the taboo in May; giving them plenty of time to prepare and gather supplies. Shortly after Mustang and Hawkeye would have shown up in search of the brother due to misinformation and it would have gotten rolling from there.
Ed would have been in a regular prosthetic by June and by the end of July he would have been fitted with automail. But that’s what I mean by a step up system - Pinako would have made him work on a plain prosthetic to test and build his strength - keep him moving to stop his body from withering away on him and to keep the muscle mass up. She couldn’t do something as complicated as connect all of his individual nerves to a steel prosthetic without that kind of build up.
He would have been down for a few weeks after the surgery because it’s shown in the series to drop him for several hours after the nerves are reconnected (2003 anyways) because of the mass amount of pain it can put a person in - so to have his body now having to adjust to the new implants and metal parts put inside of it? I have no doubt he ended up with post operation pain, probably a fever and they were probably watching him like a hawk to make sure he didn’t end up with any kind of infection.
I also have no doubt that when he was down because of injuring himself / pushing himself too hard he was working on smaller things because there was no time to stop. Can’t handle working on the parallel bars anymore today? Whelp it’s just as good of time as any to work on those fine motor skills.
Because remember, Edward can’t feel anything with his left foot or his right hand, all he’s got going for him is the sensation of weight and proprioception.
(proprioception is the sense of self-movement and body position.)
So basically he can tell his arm is raised but he can’t feel anything with it. He would have had to rework all his fine motor skills, so he can spin that spear in his hand, let alone just eat a meal with it and I have no doubt that it took months.
Cause well, knowing Pinako - if Edward started coughing up blood I’m sure she’d stop him from going any further. I’m sure she’d make him be done for the day but knowing how Edward doesn’t know how to stay down there had to be some kind of compromise -
‘Okay you can’t keep trying to walk today but you can set there and practice writing if you want.’
I’m sure he scared them a few times and I’m sure when he started into his weight training he started with way too much and hurt himself. I’m sure he hurt himself countless times in this process, but he just kept pushing forward because he kept himself in the mindset that the pain he felt was nothing compared to what Alphonse had to deal with.
He probably was on some form of assisted walking for some time, moving from crutches to cane eventually just to steady himself until his body had grow accustom to moving that much weight. He would have put his body through hell when it comes to building muscle because otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to function and he wouldn’t be able to springboard off his brother’s arm in a fight.
There’s a reason for pictures like this one:
That kid is jacked. Years and years of moving something that’s many times heavier than a limb made of flesh and bone - heavy enough to stunt his growth.
So what do we take away from this other than the fact that Ed is ridiculous built for a 15 year old and that his automail is extremely heavy?
Rushing his rehabilitation did him no favors. It got him up and moving a lot faster and it got his body in prime psychical condition but I also have a feeling it left him with some issues.
Paninya mentions in Rush Valley in the storm that traps the boys and Winry at Dominic’s house that her stumps ache when it rains.
But her reaction just seems to be some minor aches and pains. Some annoyances and things to just ride out. Her reaction seems no where near as drastic as Edward’s.
He explains to Pinako that his stumps ache in the rain before it rains and then he ends up on his knees throwing up as the storm hits. He explains to Pinako that “it feels like my stomach is being twisted off.”
And he continues to be in a severe amount of pain for the rest of the scene.
So I have a personal belief that Edward feels severe pain through nausea. Like the pain is there, and it’s enough to make him dizzy but it makes him nauseous as hell and if he pushes it too far / or the weather is too severe then he’s going to end up a complete mess. It’s common place for changes in barometric pressure to cause old injuries to ache - everything from old breaks to migraines can occur so it makes prefect sense to me that Edward’s lost limbs would flare in such weather. Extreme temperatures can also cause old injuries to become painful.
When weather effects old injuries, this change in weather the body may cause soft tissue to swell and fluid around the joints to expand. The expanding and contracting of muscles can also irritate nerves and cause pain**. Edward’s automail is connected directly to his nervous system with each and every one of the nerves of his right arm and left leg setting in their own individual housing unit.
[ ** https://www.keckmedicine.org/why-do-old-injuries-ache-when-it-rains/ ]
It makes prefect sense to me for weather changes to drop that boy considering how much he rushed his rehabilitation. Edward was supposed to spend 3 years or 1095 days on his rehabilitation minimum but instead he spent 1 year or 365 days. He spent approximately 33% of the time on recovering than he should of.
The body didn’t have the time to truly heal and accept the new additions to it before he went at working to shape and tone his body full force. His body didn’t have time to keep up with his rushed speed of forcing himself back into working order. It makes total sense to me that weather would fuck him up in compared to someone like Paninya.
Even worse of the matter, one of the limbs he lost was his leg and he didn’t give his hips time to adjust. Your lower body carries much more of your weight than you realize as when you walk your knees are there to absorb shock. Edward has one knee. Every time you take a step, the force that hits your knee is 1 and ½ times your body weight* and now he’s dropping his body weight and his automail arm’s weight down on top of them.
[* https://www.health.harvard.edu/pain/why-weight-matters-when-it-comes-to-joint-pain]
He practically sprinted through his recovery all in the name of becoming a State Alchemist faster. Honestly, it probably wouldn’t have killed him to give it two years but we all know how well Edward Elric works with patience.
There is most likely pressure on his hips constantly and his knee probably hurts at end of the day because he’s dropping so much weight on top of it. Because think about it, if the 1 ½ times your body weight equation is what we’re working with that means every step Ed takes he’s dropping 255 lbs of pressure on his knees, if he weight 170lbs (including the weight of his automail). At an incline it increases, to 2 to 3 your body weight ( 2 times - 340) and 4 to 5 when you squat down or lean over (4 times - 680). He’s dropping some serious weight on his lower body and I assume that it goes up even higher if you run, let alone if you spring board.
Spring board from seven foot in the air.
I think it just needs to be said, that when it comes to Edward’s being as a whole, his lower body is million times more deadly than his upper body and I would rather take a punch from that boy than a kick of any kind.
But I just want people to think though how much deadlier he would have been if it didn't rush it. Think about much fiercer he could have been if he only felt normal aches and pains in severe weather and it didn’t drop him to his knees. He gave himself 33% of the healing time Pinako told him he needed. 33% that’s it. That’s a failing grade on a grading scale.
But we all know Edward Elric doesn’t know how to stay down.
And he doesn’t just take shit in storms either. Extreme Cold slams his ass too.
Granted he should have changed his automail over to Northern Automail before heading to Briggs, but that was more because of the metals it was made of and the oils it used than anything else. When the boys get caught by Buccaneer, Edward’s automail jams up on him and he doesn’t just have difficultly moving it - he also declares pain - that “it shouldn’t be hurting” in the anime.
This is another consequence he has to deal with thanks to poor communication and a risk he faces because he went up into the frigid north with the wrong kind of metal and it nearly gave him frostbite. But on top of this issue, as previously mentioned, old wounds react to spikes or plummets in temperature and now he’s got his joints inflamed while he’s trying to fight in sub zero temperatures. Briggs was a lot more of a mess than it really was hinted at in the anime.
^ That’s why they have him stripped down to his boxers in the middle of the fort. Because they had to put steaming hot cloths on his ports to reheat the skin around his ports and to get the oil back to a temperature that it would flow through the unit otherwise he’s got no limbs to stand on because they won’t move.
But remember, the frostbite was occurring to his ports and his ports are the connection of automail to his nerves. He’s lucky he didn’t walk away with nerve damage and honestly with him being told ‘a little longer and you would have had complete frost bite.’ he probably did.
And on the opposite side of that Edward has to deal with extreme heat as a problem too - where any of the metal is touching flesh has the potential to cause burns and potentially more scarring and damage.
The dub line being “My Automail almost seared through my skin.”
But again, this is around the ports of his automail where all the nerves are housed and metal was put inside his body so that metal is effected by temperature as well whether it be heat or cold. He’s got to stay out of extremes even if just to avoid any undo damages to his body because if he loses the nerve endings the limbs will no longer function correctly and that defeats the entire purpose.
There’s a reason why the guy in the page I posted at the very beginning of this says “He doesn’t have that kind of courage” when Pinako asks him if he’s upgrading to automail. There’s a lot of drawbacks when it comes to the use of it.
And this lovable jackass only gave himself 33% of the healing time he was supposed to have when recovering from it.
Like I know he was in a rush and all, but giving himself a little bit of extra time would have probably done him some good. It’s not like we see him go down over the rain just once.
No, we saw that shit in episode 5 of Brotherhood, Chapter 5 of the Manga directly after Nina dies. He wakes in a fright from a nightmare; a cold sweat and instantly falls to pain. Just for some reason the anime doesn’t let him say anything about it so it’s completely missed for anime viewers.
He’s been dealing with pain for years, since he was 11 and the automail was attached but he was too busy rushing his way through his rehabilitation that he didn’t think anything about it and if he did he probably thought he’d pushed himself too hard again. He probably had no idea that the effects would be lasting when it all started and once he figured it out he certainly couldn’t tell anyone because if he did then they would make him stop and he couldn’t have that.
So as I mentioned in Automail Part 1 - Al is probably the only one who really knows about the pain because someone’s got to take care of him when he’s in so much pain he can’t even lift the damn things. When he’s so bad that his left leg can take the pressure but his right knee just buckles. Someone’s got to tell Mustang that he can’t come in on some of the times he’s summoned and honestly Alphonse probably forces him to stay down.
But the other half of why I think Ed’s pain is so much worse than that of a normal person, because of exactly that he’s not a normal person. His body isn’t average as we all know. He’s behind in the growth section - so he weighs drastically more than he should for his frame. Everything hurts. His hips, his knees, his back, his shoulder blades, everything. He probably is running around with inflammation and doesn’t even know it because he’s so accustom to just being in pain.
Just the weather strikes and there’s those days it makes it downright unbearable but we all know Ed will pass out before he stops. That’s why thankfully he has a brother like Alphonse to make his stubborn ass stay down.
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