How can I make rapid recovery from prosthetic arm surgery more plausible?

Near the beginning of my story, my main character loses an arm, and is going to get a prosthetic replacement. I've done some research on prosthetic limbs, and as one might expect, you're not good to go in a week.

The problem is, I had intended for everything to be occurring during a serious winter storm, in order to limit communications in a fairly remote area. I'm willing to scale this back to an especially bad winter season, but I still don't seem to have enough time for recovery. I'm somewhat limited in using different ways to knock communications out, because the story is drawing a parallel with a storm, and doing almost meta-commentary with it.

The good news, is I'm operating maybe 5-15ish years in the future, so that I can have some more advanced genetics/biotech stuff going on. I don't mind saying that the hospital he will be at is the world's leader, as a major plot point is a nearby top-tier research lab.

Is it plausible that prosthetic technology might advance enough in that timeframe, so that I could have my main character up and active in 2-3 weeks? I wouldn't even mind if he has some ongoing pain/fatigue from cutting things a bit short.

Thanks!

posted almost 10 years ago

grymble‭

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