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. We’re not medical professionals and haven’t 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 it’s something you really want to pursue, I’d suggest doing extensive amounts of research.
But she’d 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. There’s 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 doesn’t touch on the psychological struggles that she’d face. Athletes and injuries aren’t 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 they’re suddenly forced to stay in bed for six weeks, when they can’t get up out of bed without help, when an orderly has to help them go to the bathroom, when their wheelchair (which she’ll need while she’s learning to use the prosthetics) won’t fit inside their house because the specifications weren’t built for it, when they can’t climb the stairs, when they’re 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 you’re working with a futuristic setting. She’s 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.
Here’s 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. It’s 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, I’d 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 “I can’t walk”. It took two instructors supporting me on either side to carry me to the bench. My parents weren’t there and my mom didn’t 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 didn’t know how to use crutches.
Our house isn’t 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 wouldn’t 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 didn’t 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 couldn’t roll over, and I couldn’t 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. I’d 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 can’t hide from the physical one. People will see it and they will react to it: pity, disgust, curiosity are common. Mostly they don’t look at you, or when they do, they’re 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 (you’d have to turn the wheelchair on a diagonal to get through and they were standing in the way). If you don’t take their help with gratitude (even when it’s not helpful) they get upset.
Things people say and do when you’re disabled that are really annoying: they use the handicap stall even though they’re not disabled and there are other stalls available, especially when they take the stall right in front of you because they’re ahead in line and didn’t see you, they tell you how lucky you are that you don’t 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 “ewww, that’s gross!”. When someone takes your crutches and hides them outside the classroom because they think it’s “funny”. When people are nice to you because you’re in a wheelchair. When people think you can’t do anything for yourself because you’re in a wheelchair. When people think your mind got broken the same time as your legs because you’re 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 doesn’t have wheelchair access, having to sit at the back of the class, having to get a new locker lower to the floor because you can’t 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 can’t get home by yourself anymore. Not seeing the inside of your own room for two months because you’re in a wheelchair.
It all adds up and it’s 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 you’re really serious about having your character be a paraplegic, these are all things that you have to consider seriously for your story. It’s 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 can’t any longer.
I don’t know if that’s helpful, but it’s what I’ve 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.)
