Category: Let's talk
today on tv they had an interview with a guy who'd had a double arm transplant. he lost his arms in some accident when he'd helped his brother launch a home made rocket which blew up instead of going up. for 4 years he lived with prosthetic arms and then after he watched a programme on tv about limb transplants he contacted the surgeons and had a double arm transplant.
And after he'd had the transplant, it actually took him 4 years to come to terms with it. apparently psychologically it is very hard to come to terms with the fact that you have the arms of someone who is actually dead. with organs etc it is apparently not so hard because they're not there in sight they're just part of you, but with an arm/hand it is a different thing.
so what do you all reckon? could you have the arm of a dead person? how would you feel if your partner had had such a transplant, could you live with being touched by the hand of a dead person?
when you put it that way, it sounds creapy.
Yeah it does but I think I could live with it. It might be strange at first but at the end it's better than having no arms at all.
it wouldn't be the 1st time
yes if it meant being able to resume almost all of my activties then why not, its a fantastic step forward and I'm all for progress in medicine.
Yeah, I agree. Even if it seems disgusting at first.
it may be hard to live with at first, but i think as time goes on, it will get easier.
Yeah, that's what I mean.
Eek. It would definitely be strange, especially considering how individual one's hands are. I think it would be a while before you could think of an alien hand as being your own or that of your S.O. I think though, that I would get used to it, and think of it as an extention of the self and not of it's original owner, and I think that eventually, I wouldn't have to think of it at all.
Just a thought,
Erin
There's a book by John Irving based on exactly this premise (it's called The Forth Hand). Basically, this woman whose husband died wants this guy who lost his hand to have her late husband's hand. She is still in love with her husband, and she begins an affair with the hand-receiver so that she can essentially be touched by her husband's hand again. It's bizarre and I might be a bit shaky on the details since I read it a while ago, but what's interesting is this conflict of ownership where the hand is concerned. Both of the main characters feel that even though the new guy now has the hand, it still sort of belongs to the original owner.
well I guess there's a lot of sense in that really. after all, when it's a heart, a liver, a kidney ... whatever, although effectively a part of the dead person is helping the living one to lead a normal life, this all happens beneath the surface. Whereas in the case of a hand, a part of the dead guy is actually visible, effectively, you are being touched by someone else, yes it is the receiver of the hand who is performing the action, but the hand itself is that of another person.
of course there was also that horror film with the same title as this topic, where various parts of a man's body were transplanted on to victims, and those people went around murdering people.
I did see an artacle once though about people who had had organ transplants, and how some of them had described how their personalities had changed after the transplant, how they had actually taken on some of the trates of the doner of the organs. how true it is I don't know, but these people seemed convinced enough.
I saw a fascinating docu on that very subject a woman from NY had a heart transplant..the donor was a young man killed in an motorbike accident...some months after the transplant she began to have thoughts and feelings including a taste for beer and a liking for young women ect..that were completely alien to her..she became convinced that some residual presence of her donor still inhabited her heart..she was not a crackpot attention seeker, or hysterical in any way she came across as a rational down to earth intelligent middle aged woman..science for years has said that emotions and sensations originate in the brain but this case if proven could re-write the rule book
I saw a fascinating docu on that very subject a woman from NY had a heart transplant..the donor was a young man killed in an motorbike accident...some months after the transplant she began to have thoughts and feelings including a taste for beer and a liking for young women ect..that were completely alien to her..she became convinced that some residual presence of her donor still inhabited her heart..she was not a crackpot attention seeker, or hysterical in any way she came across as a rational down to earth intelligent middle aged woman..science for years has said that emotions and sensations originate in the brain but this case if proven could re-write the rule book