DIY Surgery

On the commute home, I caught the tail-end of a story about a 19th Century woman who learned she had breast cancer and performed her own mastectomy. According to the DJ, she survived the operation and lived many more decades after that.

The story sounded bogus to me — for one thing, I can’t imagine how she could deal with the blood loss — so I decided to see what I could find out about people who have operated on themselves.

Considerable gore below the fold. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I was only trying to remove a mole, I swear!

1. Previously, I’ve written about a young man who castrated himself in order to reduce his sex drive, but had problems when he went after his adrenal glands. I had heard this story in med school in a rather third-hand sort of way, so I was never too sure of the factuality (or the details). The book Bodies under Siege: Self-Mutilation and Body Modification in Culture and Psychiatry has the scoop.

In short, a 21-year-old man was so dismayed by his “compulsive masturbation” that he tried to find a surgeon who would castrate him. No one would do it for him, so he began self-medicating with drugs that would suppress his sex drive. He ultimately performed the bilateral orchiectomy (castration), survived it, and two months later went on to attempt an adrenal denervation. Apparently, he thought that if he could decrease his adrenal glands’ secretions, his mental anguish would resolve. He kept at it for eight hours before the pain finally got to him.

So: probably a true story, although I could find no other corroboration on the web. I give this one a 9 on the Gruesometer.

2. Sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do:

Alone in her one-room cabin high in the mountains of southern Mexico, Ines Ramirez Perez felt the pounding pains of a child insistent on entering the world.

I’ll spare you the vivid details and cut to the chase.

Ines Ramirez is recognised internationally as a modern miracle: She is believed to be the only woman known to have performed a successful Caesarean-section on herself.

This one’s in Wikipedia with citations, so it must be true. No word as to whether the baby survived.

This would have been a 7 on the Gruesometer, but I’ll give it an 8 because Sra. Perez drank isopropyl alcohol before beginning the procedure. Drinking rubbing alcohol? Gyaaah!

3. While he was at it, he should have made himself less of an asshole:

For nine months Dr. Theodor Herr’s appendix had been nudging and twingeing him. Recently the brisk, 37-year-old German surgeon, of Hamdorf, near Kiel, decided it was time to have it out. To find out how his own patients felt, he injected Novocaine and operated on himself. Unlike most surgeons in self-operations, Herr used no mirrors, merely had an assistant hand him his instruments as he worked (from a half-reclining position). Next day he was out of bed, attending to his patients.

Dr. Herr, who is a bit unsympathetic with the vocally suffering, had proved one of his theories: “Now that I have successfully operated on myself … I feel justified in making patients get up as soon as possible . . .”

Only a 2 on the Gruesometer.

4. In August, 2004, plastic surgeon Robert Ersek performed liposuction on himself with news cameras rolling. It was for a good cause; he was trying to harvest some of his own stem cells (for cryo storage, in case he needed them at some future date), and he wanted to “show how safe and simple the procedure really is.” Here’s a snip from the linked interview.

Q: What kind of reaction did it get? From your patients and from the professional societies?

A: My patients, colleagues and close friends loved it. However, the ethics committee of the local plastic surgery professional society wrote me a letter of rebuke and called me on the carpet for treating myself. I carefully explained I was not really treating myself but collecting stem cells, had four other qualified surgeons in the room and, O.K., I won’t do it any more.

Q: Did all the hoopla result in any good things for stem cell research?

A: Sure, I now have about four million viable cells on ice and the next patient in the demonstration now has 20 million cells stored. Each time the cryogenic company freezes and stores a patient’s stem cells, a portion goes to research. So I’m offering a new service to my lipoplasty patients. Through my good offices, they can store their own stem cells which, until now, have gone to waste. Yearly, this nation throws away a trainload of valuable stem cells.

Another 2 on the Gruesometer. He’s way too sensible and good-humored to make that needle pop up over two.

And then there’s this dude:

5. João de Deus, psychic surgeon.

John of God, (João de Deus) is without a doubt one of the most powerful channeling mediums and healers alive today. João has been at the Casa de Dom Inacio for over 30 years. There are some thirty three entities he incorporates at the Casa, so named after one of the entities, St Ignatius de Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. He is free of charge.

. . . .

João in entity has also operated on himself. After he suffered a heart attack some years ago, the entities did a physical surgery on his body. This was a truly remarkable event, given the fact that João hates the sight of blood. Luckily for him, as usual, with all the work he does in entity, he had no recollection of the operation.

Nine on the Gruesometer. Who knows where those entities’ hands have been?

Here’s a famous one:

6. Jerri Lin Nielsen,

Nielsen’s saga began in 1999, when she took a year’s sabbatical at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station on Antarctica. This perilous region experiences almost total darkness for six months of the year, and in winter the temperature remains steady at around 85 below zero Fahrenheit (−65 degrees Celsius).

In the course of her work at the research station, Nielsen discovered a lump in her breast. After consulting U.S. physicians via email, she performed a biopsy upon herself, and later began self-administered chemotherapy treatments using supplies from a risky July cargo drop to ensure her survival until conditions permitted her rescue several months later.

Gruesometer? One. The woman is a hero.

Two hours of googling, and that’s all I’ve found. Nothing about the story which got me started on this search in the first place, thank heavens. I suspect that might have rated a ten.

As for me, the most I’ve ever done is treat my own hangnails and freeze stuff off myself with liquid nitrogen. Back in residency, I sustained a scalpel injury and decided to irrigate the wound with betadyne. The pain from this was so shocking, I knew I had to do something: I would inject the wound with local anesthetic, then irrigate it. But the pain from the injection was even more shocking. And I’d been doing this to people for the last two years! That was an education.

Once, I walked Karen through a procedure. I was having frequent nosebleeds, and I wanted her to cauterize a vessel in my nose. She performed admirably. Does that count as self-treatment?

I suppose I could have asked one of the ER docs to do it for me, but that wouldn’t have made for much of a story.

D.