I thought he was disabled, he wasn’t

I was a young resident in physical medicine and rehabilitation when I met him-a man in his fifties who had recently suffered a stroke.He had a left-sided hemiplegia with hemineglect and was admitted to our rehabilitation unit.What caught my attention was that he also had a left transfemoral amputation decades before.He was kind, open, and shared that his longstanding phantom limb phenomenon had vanished after the stroke-something he associated with the onset of neglect.As his awareness of the left side gradually returned, so did the phantom sensation.Witnessing that shift firsthand stayed with me-how quietly the brain can redraw its own map of the body.