We Should Hang Out Sometime: Embarassingly, A True Story

Sundquist’s explains that his prosthetic leg is a symbol of his attempts to look and move like a person without a disability. With an amputation at hip-disarticulation level, Sundquist can only wear a cumbersomely heavy prosthetic leg with three artificial joints: hip, knee, and ankle. He is much “faster and more agile without the leg”; however, his self-consciousness and reliance on his hands with the crutches means that he initially opts to use the leg for nonathletic activities (14). While Sundquist thinks he has a system which allows him to hide his disability most of the time, his need to plan when he must use his prothesis becomes problematic at his church group’s retreat, when he annoys his youth pastor, Joe Slater, by continually asking him what the group is going to do next. Sundquist feels isolated in his inability to be spontaneous and with the sensation that “not knowing the activity schedule was like living in an environment where the weather could fluctuate by one hundred degrees at any moment” (13).

The prosthesis as a stand-in for his amputated leg also backfires on his golfing date with Francesca, when its cumbersomeness cannot sustain his enthusiasm at having a good shot and he falls flat and the foot on his artificial leg turns backwards.