This morning, at a Kinko's in Las Vegas, I made a copy of the transcript of several micro-cassettes, put the pages into a preaddressed FedEx envelope, and wrote a note to my online editor:
Dear Ellen,
Yesterday, I came across a Reuters follow-up to what was ostensibly the world's first hand and forearm transplant.
It wasn't--the first, I mean.
In the case I read about, a New Zealander named Clint Hallam, received the transplant from a brain-dead, 41-year-old motorcyclist. He was fine until 1998, two years post-surgery, when he began to complain about pains which included a burning sensation. He has appealed, without success, to the British surgeon involved in the original operation at the Edouard Herriot hospital in Lyon, France, to amputate the transplant.
Were I to find Mr. Hallam, who is apparently here in Las Vegas in search of a surgeon willing to perform the amputation, I'd send him to Dr. Piet Runolo. But first I'd ask him to talk about how the transplant affected his persona and his life in ways other than the expected. I'm willing to bet it did. If he's alive and still has that cyclist's hand, he's probably using it to drive a motorcycle into the desert.
The question is, what would that make Mr. Hallam? Is he still Clint Hallam, or has he mutated into an extension of the brain-dead cyclist?
Should his pain be treated by psychiatry, drugs, prayer, witchcraft? A combination of all four?
Would his insurance pay?
Probably not, though it is the 21st Century and times they are a'changing--perhaps even for the better.
You and I have often bemoaned the primitive attitude of the AMA and medical insurance companies regarding alternative medicine. That's why I'm sending you this transcript, which is based on a series of things I saw and experienced earlier this year, none of which would have impacted me had I not, in '86, completed an assignment for Monterey Life interviewing a group of doctors' wives who piloted discarded medical equipment to needy Third World countries.
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A writer tags along with a burn surgeon on an urgent mission, and discovers that his ability to heal his patients doesn't just come from his medical school background.
