The Weekend Wall Street Journal featured a front-page piece that revealed a very different – and heart-wrenching – side of the Boston Marathon bombing for victims who lost limbs.

Struggles of Boston Amputees Mount

As Limelight Fades, Some Victims Feel Pressure to Be Resilient for Boston

LOWELL, Mass—Settling carefully into a chair at a brew pub, Celeste Corcoran surveyed the other diners. Most of them wore shorts, and she gazed at what seemed like a sea of tanned legs.

“They don’t even realize what they have,” she said.

Mrs. Corcoran, a 47-year-old hairdresser from this working-class city northwest of Boston, lost both legs when twin bombs ripped through the Boston Marathon finish line. Five months later, even routine outings can leave her feeling wistful.

State-of-the-art prostheses are slowly helping Mrs. Corcoran reclaim independence, but she can tolerate them only for a few hours a day. Her husband carries her upstairs to bed each night, and she sometimes feels stabbing pain in toes she lost months ago. Like many of the 16 people who lost limbs in the bombings, she has found recovery can be a grueling ordeal of setbacks and frustrations.

Nut graf:

[A]s Boston moves on from the April 15 attack, which killed three people and wounded more than 260, some amputees find themselves on a lonely road, grappling not only with pain and repeated surgeries but with an emotional fallout that includes pressure to be billboards for Boston’s resilience . . .

Counselors say some amputees are starting to withdraw from all the appreciative attention they got—throwing out first pitches at Fenway Park and being honored at a Patriots football game—amid the realization their recoveries aren’t straightforward tales of resolve and success.

No – their recoveries are daily slogs of resiliency and setbacks.

And, as this WSJ graphic indicates, there are so many of them.

Coda:

Most of the time, Mrs. Corcoran manages to stay positive, but “there are days when I’m crying, I’m having a tough time, and I’m in pain,” she said. On her down days, she has begun simply announcing to her family and friends, “I’m sad today because I don’t have my legs.”

Read the Journal piece. You’ll be sad today too.