Amputation Threatened Either Death or Lifelong Poverty

…To illustrate just how tough knights had to be in [the early 16th Century (C.E.), Blaise de Monluc‘s] memoirs record vividly how the enemy:

…peppered me in the meantime with an infinite number of arquebus shot, one of which, pierced my target [shield] and shot my arm quite through…and another battered the bone at the joint of my arm and shoulder that I lost all manner of feeling….

De Monluc was so determined to continue his military career that he refused to have his arm amputated. This was, in any case, a surgical procedure that threatened either death or lifelong poverty, so he chose instead to lie on his back for two months, experiencing a physical pain that he regarded as nothing compared to the torment he was enduring by missing the subsequent campaigns….

— The Art of Renaissance Warfare, Chapter 9

Emphasis mine.