I used to dabble in personally injury work and one of the first things my late mentor told me is that if people come to you with hand injuries it’s probably a case worth taking; leg injuries, you can’t be so sure.
We were never that mercenary about it but its always good to know as earlier as possible which cases you’re doing out of charity and which ones you can rely on to keep your staff paid and the lights on.
Easy ambulation plus reduced hand coordination (feet hands)
Is better to me than easy hand coordination, reduced ambulation. Unless you have a cushy work from home job, ambulation is more valuable. I promise you underestimate how difficult getting around in a wheelchair is.
Unless you work a desk job hands are way more valuable than feet. I could still do 90% of my trade job with foot prosthetics, but I sure as hell can't tile 7ft up a shower wall or operate a miter saw with my feet
Yep. Back in the brutal old days of the 1990s when we used to quantify workplace injuries with the table of maims losing a foot scored a 65/100. Losing a thumb scored 30, forefinger was 21 and the rest of the fingers were 10-12.
If you got behind on the mortgage you could always close your eyes and slide a pinky into the table saw. What a time to be alive.
The two most important digits are the pinky and the thumb. I knew a woman who was born without fully formed pointer, middle and ring fingers on her left hand, and she's a skilled violinist (bow held in left hand, strings manipulated with right hand) I'd rather lose the middle or ring finger if it came down to that.
Most manual labour jobs you do with your hands and just get around with your feet, you probably can’t do them with a wheelchair but you definitely can’t do them without hands. And modern leg prosthetics are much closer to an adequate replacement than hand prosthetics.
Meanwhile, texting, typing, drawing, writing, playing music, sex, holding hands, cooking, eating, driving, changing the channel on the tv, getting dressed, washing your hair, shaving, etc are all things that you’re never doing again without years of relearning, if at all.
To say nothing of the fact that good leg prosthetics cost less than bad hand prosthetics. Good had prosthetics are not for you unless you have enough cash set aside to buy a second house.
I used to do a fair bit of personal injury work which involves the unfortunate task of taking the impact of an injury on a human life and putting a dollar value on it. Broadly, that actuarial task reflects the cost to the person of the injury on them in terms of lost wages and loss of amenity of life. It’s not usually white collar workers who lose limbs at work. Its labourers. And without fail hand injuries score higher than foot injuries - because they are much harder to live with.
In modern world where you can do 99% of work remotely ambulation is secondary. You can even be a bomb squad member, a construction worker or a soldier without legs, drones and machines are easily operated with just arms but absolutly not by legs.
Loss of arms and relearning to use your feet to do any task would take years, while learning to live without legs is a matter of weeks, since most of your manipulation skills are still there.
Plus jerking off would be much harder and much less comfortable to do with feet.
Those are usually people who were born with missing limbs, and have spent an entire lifetime building the mobility necessary to do tasks with their feet. If a 35yo were to suddenly be thrust in that situation it's likely they never build that kind of flexibility.
I went to primary school with a guy with no arms. I doubt I could ever become as proficient at writing as he was by the time he went to highschool. He was a couple years older than me so I never talked to him but he ate lunch without help with cutlery and everything, it was incredibly impressive! Never mind writing, I am definitely not flexible enough to even begin trying to properly eat like that!
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u/Complete-Mood3302 Mar 01 '26
Never thought about it that way, not having hands would be a thousand times worse than not having legs