Yeh. Aron’s forearm, having been crushed and cut off from blood circulation for 5 days, had become gangrenous. His thumb, which was the only part of his hand he could see, grew discolored, and when he poked it with his dull pocket knife after days, it easily punctured without feeling and let out a hiss of gas that stank like death.
From this, he became so disgusted by his arm that he felt it wasn’t even his arm anymore, but some dead, disgusting thing that he had to cut off of himself. After his revelation to break the two bones in his arm, he did so with elation—trumping any pain—until he had to sever 3 or 4 spaghetti-like nerves which he said each were so painful he almost passed out. The whole operation took over 40 minutes, but despite the dead forearm, tight tourniquet, severe dehydration and adrenaline, he did feel a lot of it.
You never know what you’re capable of until you’re in it, I suppose.
I dunno, I think if I were in his situation, I’d have waited for the people I told about my hike beforehand to notice that I hadn’t come back and call the rescue squads, and meanwhile call them with the portable radio I was carrying, all with help from my hiking buddy. I think I’m capable of that.
Happens in ‘life or limb’ emergency scenarios. Some don’t even wait to the authorities to turn up - check out this story of a guy who trapped his arm in a furnace, he got about halfway through before he said the pain was too much. Luckily firefighters turned up and finished the job.
Nor is the trapped rock example unique, this guy took his leg off (!) with only a pocket knife (!!) when trapped by a falling tree. This miner got his arm trapped in some machinery and fearing fire took it off with nothing but Stanley knife, which makes me wince just thinking about it.
A little OT, but my aunt had vascular disease in her right leg, and after several surgeries failed to permanently correct it, she was in pain a lot, and couldn’t walk, except hobble around the house a little. She was in a wheelchair most of the time, and was generally severely disabled by pain. She had a below the knee amputation (after a couple of days in the hospital on the strong medicines and some Novocaine, too, IIRC, to prevent phantom pain), and after that, and six months of PT, she could walk again.
She has no regrets whatsoever, and in her words “had no love for that leg.” Her leg was never gangrenous, but at one point, she had some necrotic muscle tissue removed during a vascular surgery, and for all I know (I don’t even have an honorary doctorate), that could have screwed up the way nerve signals were processed. At any rate, other people were more upset for her than she was upset for herself when that happened. She was excited about the idea of walking again.
Unless the name of that movie/book was something like “Prepared!” or “Into The Wild (With a Proper Contingency Plan)” or “127 Hours Until Full Recovery Thanks to Taking the Appropriate Precautions”.
I’ve read stories where a person lost a limb, and then immediately thrust the stump into a bonfire, or just burned it to cauterize the wound. Was that actually ever done in extreme cases?
It used to be done all the time. Although they used a metal cauterizer, rather than just sticking the arm in the fire. It’s effective at stopping the bleeding, but can lead to infection.
What takes ten minutes? A sharp knife will cut through a lot of flesh in just a few seconds, and after that it’s a matter of cutting through the bone, which I wouldn’t have guessed takes ten minutes.
In a non-emergency procedure in an operating room with general anesthesia, I can certainly see the surgeon taking his time to leave a nice, clean result with a generous flap of skin for covering the end of the stump, but if you have no anesthesia then speed is the order of the day.
Tying off arteries with silk thread, I suppose. I assumed we were talking about the medical kind of amputation someone might conceivably survive, not hacking off the odd testicle with the limb for speed records.
It’s been a while, but did he actually tell anyone he was going hiking there? According to his wiki:
And, regarding the arm bones, he torqued his arm until the ulna and the radius broke. He wouldn’t have been able to cut through them with his pocketknife, which was dull and the blade was 2 inches. He said it took him about 1 hour to do.
They knew he was going on a hike, but he didn’t tell anybody where he was going (IIRC, in his book, he admits to cockiness playing a big part here, as he is an accomplished mountaineer). Hence Chronos’s bit of sarcasm.
I remember a scene in the HBO series John Adams wherein his daughter has breast cancer and they lop off her boob… just upstairs, in her room, with no anesthetic. :eek: Totally turned me off the series and I stopped watching.
Yeah. They tied her four limbs to the four bedposts. Gave her something to bite down on, then went to work. Sadly, the cancer got her anyway, though the mastectomy didn’t. That was a pretty horrifying scene, but remember they also inoculated for smallpox by dragging a guy around town and pulling cultures off of him. Can’t imagine that’s real fun for the guy dying of smallpox.
Mostly it is. The problem comes in when there’s a little pocket or hole in the tissue and a bacteria lands in it before the cautery iron hits. Then the bacteria is sealed up all nice and cozy inside where it can multiply and fester, like the world’s most disgusting pepperoni Hot Pocket.
Cautery was done to reduce bleeding first and reduce chances of infection second, but you still ran the risk of abscess, little pockets of infection under the surface.