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Phantom Limb Syndrome

I woke up in the hospital a week and a half after the incident. I had been flown back from Iraq after that bomb blew off my right arm. As I awoke, they asked how I felt. I wasn't feeling sick or anything, but it felt as if there was a lot of pain where my right arm used to be. I told them about this, but they insisted I was just experiencing Phantom Limb Syndrome, where amputees feel pain or other sensations where their arm or leg used to be.
I could deal with the pain, but the rehab would be stressful. My right arm was my dominant, so I needed to learn to write, feed myself, and do other actions with my left, especially since my wife and I didn't have enough money to afford even the cheapest of prosthetics, and I would need to be back on my feet, working, as soon as possible to help support our family.
"Oh well, it could've been worse," I thought, "I could've been crippled like some of the other men in my platoon."
A week after my physical therapy concluded (six months after the incident), I woke up and continued what I had been doing for the past couple of days, looking through newspapers and on the Internet for jobs. I still was feeling mild pain every now and again in my upper arm. As the day progressed, my neck mysteriously began to hurt. I thought nothing of it at the time. Each day from then on, however, my neck was hurting more and more. In addition, I was starting to have some problems with breathing every now and then. I told my wife about it, and she suggested I change up my sleeping position. I did so, with no success.
Then, one fateful morning, my wife woke up abnormally early. I'm normally the early riser. You get that way when you're in a war zone for months at a time, having to wake early so I could get the jump on my enemies. As my wife awoke, she looked over at me. Then she let out a loud scream.
There was a hand around my neck, squeezing. It wasn't attached to any body, and was scorched and bloodied up. At her scream, it dissolved into thin air. She shook me intensely, awakening me. She hyperventilated while telling me what she had seen, crying into my shoulder.
The doctors didn't believe either of us. My wife was hysterical. She wasn't sure if what she saw was real or not. She had nightmares about the hand. Every night, she saw the hand gripping my neck, squeezing, taking every bit of life out of me. Most ominous, though, were the instances where she recalled the arm laying on the bed and trying to reattach itself. I assured her that they were just dreams or hallucinations, but she seemed convinced that they were real. Then one day, sanity had fully departed her. She couldn't get up. She just sat there, eyes glazed over. She mumbled. The only discernible bits were her repeating over and over, "Don't leave me. It burns."

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