How injured is Joe?

Joe is seriously injured. He finds out progressively through the first part that he is deaf, then he is missing his arms, then his legs, then he is blind and has no face. He essentially has no ability to do anything, communicate, or express his thoughts in any way. However, he is not paralyzed, and his mind is completely intact, which is the worst torture of all. All he has is his mind and his consciousness and therefore that is how the entire book is narrated. It would be extremely frustrating... maddening in fact, to be able to be perfectly conscious and be unable to express anything whatsoever. One of his greatest desires is to die because he doesn't want to have to put up with this, and therefore he realizes that death for a cause isn't worth anything because he is the closest to death that is possible without actually being dead, so essentially he is aware of his "death" as opposed to someone who is actually dead who is presumably unaware of this, and from that standpoint he says that a person should always preserve their life.