There is an elderly woman who lives in our building. She always remembers to respectfully greet Monty and ask after him. I think she does some volunteer work, and this evening as I was walking towards the front path to our building, I found her sitting waiting for a taxi with a woman whom I have seen with her before. This younger woman sits in a wheel chair and seems quite friendly and perhaps developmentally handicapped. They both like Monty - I've run into the 2 of them a few times over the past several months.
The woman in the wheelchair, her leg - the first time I saw her - was in a metal device, bracing her leg, with metal pins entering the skin, presumably screwed into the bone. Imagine the worst device you can for pinning a leg back together. That's what she had.
Tonight her leg was looking better, I think the device had been removed. I asked her how her health was. She looked happy to have a chance to talk about it. She happily said "I got some good news today! They are going to amputate."
I blinked once and kept smiling, wondering what social world I had suddenly been thrust into, and what my options were. For a second I thought that maybe amputation was going to free her from infection, or pain, or give her the chance to walk perhaps with a prothesis. Then I ran out of ideas. She may have noticed my hesitancy to say anything else and to simply smile and stop blinking, and took my pause as a chance to continue: "Yes, they were going to amputate but told me they wouldn't. They say it is getting better and that I can move home now after 6 months in the hospital."
I recovered and said "Well, that's wonderful news for you to digest!". She'd likely already digested that news - rather it was I who was still digesting. I think I'd misheard her - I think I heard "They are" instead of "They were".
It was the oddest thing my brain had claimed to hear in a long while - "I got some good news today! They are going to amputate."