Monday 9 July 2012

Hands of a Stranger


I listened to an appeal from a specialist surgeon at Leeds General Hospital today, asking for people to donate their hands to others who had lost one or more through accident, and - after I had got the image of the film with the above title out of my head, the idea appealed to me.  Here's the waiver:


First of all, let me apologise to all the other specialists at Leeds and everywhere else for not donating any of the other organs that might become available after you have read this, but - believe me - you and nobody else would want them anyway.  Not the liver, not the kidneys, not the heart, not the lungs - but you may want my hands.

Of all the parts of my body, my hands are the the ones which - in the past - have brought me the most compliments, and they are also have been the things to have survived the most intact, despite - or because of - that they have been used and abused pretty much every day since I left school.  I think they still have some life left in them, despite showing some signs of wear and tear, but that's for you to decide.  My hair isn't bad either, but a bit too white for general use, I think.

I don't know if you can match the hands of a 60+ year old man to the arms of a youth, or even if the hands themselves keep an internal record of how long they should keep on keeping on, but it may be worth a try.

They are quite large, but not the largest you can get, so this should keep the options open a bit.  Anyway, here are the pros and cons:

CONS:  They have a few lumps in them, caused by continuously hitting stone for around 35 years, and the joints show early signs of arthritis by the swelling and bending in some strange directions.

The joints where they abut the wrists are not as thick as they ideally could be, so the new owner should beware of tendonitis caused by trauma or repetitive stress.

There is a small scar on the joint of the index finger of the left one, caused when foolishly splitting a dowel with a Bowie knife when aged about 12.  Curiously, the area around the scar is unusually sensitive after all these years, but this may not translate when sewn onto the recipient's arm.

Both the left and right hand have shown an unerring tendency to seek out other parts of other humans - usually female - and must be strictly controlled.

PROS: Both hands are extremely strong, but have never been used to strangle anyone, unlike those of a friend of mine who has smaller ones which he used to kill someone with whilst serving in the military.  You would not want to transplant his haunted eyes either.

They have served me quite well and dexterously, and I really think that they have a good many year's worth of service left in them.

The tendons and veins are well delineated, so the stitching up should be fairly straightforward...  but what would I know?

All the nails are strong and undamaged - I have never bitten them in my life.

Anyway, help yourself and good luck.


13 comments:

  1. Rereading, this post sounds a lot more macabre than intended - I really do like the idea of my hands carrying on being useful, in the unlikely event of my mortality being tested to the extreme.

    Also, it is bloody amazing that the surgeon at Leeds - himself suffering a devastating injury when 16 which drove him to become a hand micro-surgeon - can actually stick them onto the arms of strangers too. Brilliant. Strange, but brilliant. I should learn to play the piano before it's too late to strangle someone.

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  2. Can you imagine looking down at your hand....but it's not your hand?

    I used to have to order bone from a bone bank for my surgeon boss. On one occasion we had two femur s from the same cadaver marked left. I had to take them to the xray department and find out which was truly the left, as once the sterile package was opened it could not be re-packaged if we got the wrong one. There was an issue in xray because we had no health card number with which to register the "patient". An offshoot, but your hand story made me think about it.

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    1. Perhaps the donor did really have two left feet when living?

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  3. humm I wonder if your "donated" hands will ultimately do an "Adams family" "thing" sort of thing? ( if you get my gist?) if so the poor recipient will have to be content for their hands to be able to make beautiful sculpture pieces as well as "feeling up" any passing busty barmaids

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    1. There also might be a lot more Onanism than the recipient had bargained for.

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  4. Proof, Mr Stephenson, that when stumped for a subject on which to write, even describing one's own hands can prove fascinating. I think I could donate my own hand skin, but the interior bones and meat are no longer worth bothering with!

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    1. 'Stumped'? Was that intentional? I wanted to write about it at work where I heard the appeal, but had to wait until I had got back home - which explains the references to implied bar-maids.

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  5. I think this must be one of the most original posts I've ever come across... Gives one pause for thought -- for example could human bodies one day be used like old cars are now -- piled high for useful body parts -- kind of a Grim Wrecker scenario...

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    1. They recently carried out a successful FULL face transplant. I'm not sure I would like the idea of that, unless it was the face of someone extremely well-known, like George Clooney, for instance.

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  6. Well, I dare say that I wasn't even in the business looking for new hands but now I am interested. That was one of the best sale pitches I have ever heard.

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  7. This made me think of when my brother died. He was an organ donor, and against his wishes, my SIL had an open casket at the viewing/wake (she was Catholic, he was not). SIL wanted me to go up to the casket and say a prayer with her. I thought if she wanted me to touch his corpse, i'd have to be carried out. I tried finding something that still looked like him. It was his hands. They still looked okay, so i focused on his hands and thought of all the thankless tasks they had done.

    I think they are connected to the heart, and i hope the recipient who got my brother's was worthy of the gift.

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    1. I've only just found this post, Megan - sorry. As H.I. said to me when we were viewing her dead mother, and I said that the thing was not 'her', "No, but she spent a long time inside it". How true.

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