I’ve been helping out someone who just had surgery and I’ve been wondering what the legal ramifications of taking home part of your body after surgery would be. She had part of her abdominal muscles removed and I thought, “Wow, I wonder if you could have them throw it in a cooler and you could take it home and slap it on the grill like flank steak and eat part of yourself.” Juvenile I know.
I know people can bring home gall stones and such and I’ve heard tales of placental stew. Why couldnt I bring my amputated leg home… does it cease being MINE after its removed? Furthermore are there laws against self canabalism in such a case? …I wonder how many steaks you could make from thigh cross sections…
In NJ, you can’t take home surgery souvenirs anymore. I had my gallbladder out a couple of months ago, and my doc was sorry he couldn’t give me my gallstones. He said people used to be able to take them home, and sometimes made jewelry out of them!
There are some threads here regarding placental stew. The hospital is not supposed to let you have the placenta, but sometimes the hospital staff is willing to look the other way. And of course, the placental stew crew are likely to have home births anyway.
They let me have the first set of screws that came out of my ankle earlier this summer - but I guess that qualifies more as hardware than the, um, er, ‘software’ that you folks are discussing…
I’ve got the external fixator that was removed from my leg a few years back (they are the things that are sometimes called “halos;” they basically had my left leg looking like a shish kabob for 6 months). They only gave me the external frame, though, not the pins that actually went through my leg bones and out the other side. My ortho doc said it was because there were state regulations about disposal of anything that had actually been inside a human body. I don’t know how true that was, because a few months later I met a woman who’d had a plate removed from her tibia and had it made into a bracelet.
In December of 1987, I got my tonsils out. They came home with me, in preservative fluid, in an old Cool Whip container. They were shortly transferred to an old jelly jar. I brought them with me to show-and-tell (I was in second grade at the time). They remained in my closet until my family moved in '96. By that time they had soaked up so much fluid that they looked to be the size of golf balls.
