SUPER HERO’S ARM
He approached it in a binary way. As if he were playing a football match – in one goal he imagined a bed and himself lying in it surrounded by the cordon of sympathetic people. In the second goal he was standing alone, without an arm, but on two strong legs and he decided. – “End of self-pity. I get up and fight, but for 200 percent,” says Piotr Sajdak from Cracow, who together with the Kosch brothers, runs a company that produces unique and globally-acknowledged 3D prostheses.
“It takes a while before you get used to the fact that you are missing a piece of your body,” – says Piotr. “You see in the mirror that you almost lack your entire forearm, but it feels as if it were there. You think you can rotate it, bend your fingers, or touch the wall. It is as if the nerves in the limb are strings connecting the brain with the fingertips. But this feeling is diminishing with each passing day. After two months, the invisible forearm disappeared,” he recalls.
Shortly after the accident he took part in the television program ‘MasterChef’. Still without a prosthesis. Right after amputation, he came up with the idea he would sign up for the program and prove to himself that he could still fulfill his dreams. Then came marathons. After hospital, he gained 15 kg, grew a beard and looked like a grizzly bear, so he decided: eat less and run.
At university, where he returned a month after the operation, most colleagues knew what had happened. And if someone forgot, an arm stump reminded them. Piotr shuddered at the thought of the prosthesis. He cut off his friends’ comments like, ‘Oh man, I’m so sorry’after the first word. He hated pity. ‘I just wanted to live a normal life,’ he says. In order not to focus on the accident, immediately after being discharged from hospital, he fell into a whirlwind of activities – partying, catching up with college, passing exams, moving, leaving his girlfriend and writing a BA thesis in sociology. When he stood in front of the Jagiellonian University building right after the completion of his BA thesis, he thought, ‘Man, what now? How will you live as a cripple?!’
