Then three earnest, quick-eyed doctors looked at my smashed arm. Two of them were young men, the third middle-aged. It was he who finally left the group that stepped off from my bed-side for consultation and said:
“My boy, I’m afraid it will have to come off—the hand, perhaps part of the arm.”
I had expected the verdict, yet I would be dishonest not to admit that I was shocked and horrified just the same.
My thumbless right hand had been laid bare of its bandages. I looked at it, maimed as it was, and shook my head.
“I don’t want to lose my hand, doctor,” I said, “what is left of my hand. Certainly not my arm.”
“Then,” he said, briefly enough, but with greatest kindness, “I cannot be sure that I can save your life.”
So I told him that I had always been careful of my body, had lived cleanly against every temptation and asked him if that could not be considered to count for me.
“Yes,” he said. “What you tell me certainly makes a difference. Yet I am hardly willing to advise you to take the chance.”
A sudden confidence obsessed me.
“I am willing to take the chance,” I told him. “I know I can fight it through.”