'A Leg To Stand On' by Oliver Sacks: A Reappraisal
Ten years before he wrote his book, A Leg to Stand On, Sacks was hiking in Norway when he sustained a severe leg injury. On an isolated mountain path he stumbled upon a bull and as he fled from the animal he fell and found himself "lying at the bottom of a short sharp cliff of rock, with my left leg twisted grotesquely beneath me, and my knee in such pain as I had never, ever known." Finding himself "terrifyingly and seriously alone", he formed a makeshift splint for his "utterly useless"' injured leg from his umbrella and anorak and partially descended down the mountain. Sacks described a sense of being near to death and talks about the leg as an object which was "stupid, senseless… out of control"
He was eventually rescued by reindeer hunters, put in a temporary cast and reached a hospital in London, where his leg was successfully operated on to repair an avulsed quadriceps tendon. Postoperatively he spent two days "feverish, shocked and toxic, and there was intense pain in my knee…I had periods of delirium…I felt horribly sick." He described "the systematic depersonalization which goes with becoming a patient." It was clearly a painful, fearful and distressing experience.
A Traumatic Injury
Ten years before he wrote his book, A Leg to Stand On, Sacks was hiking in Norway when he sustained a severe leg injury. On an isolated mountain path he stumbled upon a bull and as he fled from the animal he fell and found himself "lying at the bottom of a short sharp cliff of rock, with my left leg twisted grotesquely beneath me, and my knee in such pain as I had never, ever known." Finding himself "terrifyingly and seriously alone", he formed a makeshift splint for his "utterly useless"' injured leg from his umbrella and anorak and partially descended down the mountain. Sacks described a sense of being near to death and talks about the leg as an object which was "stupid, senseless… out of control"
He was eventually rescued by reindeer hunters, put in a temporary cast and reached a hospital in London, where his leg was successfully operated on to repair an avulsed quadriceps tendon. Postoperatively he spent two days "feverish, shocked and toxic, and there was intense pain in my knee…I had periods of delirium…I felt horribly sick." He described "the systematic depersonalization which goes with becoming a patient." It was clearly a painful, fearful and distressing experience.
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