To Be Seen
Copyright© 2025 by Heel
Chapter 3
The doctors did not like the scans.
They studied them in silence at first, heads inclined toward the glowing screens, fingers tracing shapes that refused to resolve into anything familiar. Her heel bone no longer looked like bone at all. It was a scatter of fragments, too many, too small, arranged without logic—as if the structure had forgotten what it was meant to be.
“This doesn’t make sense,” one of them said finally, not to her, but to the room.
They asked her again how it had happened. She told the story carefully, exactly as it was: walking, a shifting cover, a fall that was barely a fall at all. No height. No impact worthy of the damage. She watched their expressions tighten, their nods slow. They were polite, attentive, unconvinced.
The first operation was described to her as exploratory. They believed, or hoped, that once they saw the damage directly, a plan would emerge. Plates, screws, grafts—modern medicine had answers for shattered bones. They always did.
She clung to that certainty as the anesthesia took her.
When she woke, her foot was wrapped and elevated, numb and distant. The surgeon stood at her bedside with a look that tried, unsuccessfully, to be reassuring.
“It was worse than we expected,” he said.
They had tried to piece it together, fragment by fragment, like a puzzle that had been dropped and stepped on. The bone would not hold. There was no central structure left to anchor anything to. What should have been solid crumbled under the smallest pressure.
They tried again two days later.
A different approach. A different surgeon. Different tools. They spoke in cautious optimism beforehand, careful not to promise anything, but hopeful enough that she let herself imagine standing again, walking again, returning to the ordinary invisibility of her life.
That operation failed too.
The heel could not be reconstructed. Not now. Possibly not ever. The damage was too extensive, too complete, too strange for clean solutions. One doctor admitted, quietly, that it looked less like an accident injury and more like the aftermath of extreme force—something closer to a fall from height or a crushing impact.
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