Sabia Rehman, the Muslim chaplain of Sheffield Teaching Hospitals, has set up what she believes is the first public burial site in the UK for amputated limbs. So she set up a campaign for a burial site and two years later a shared space opened in a Sheffield graveyard.
Limbs are kept in a mortuary and the burial site is opened twice a year to inter them. Anyone can use the free service and so far about 20 limbs have been buried there.
But the amputee community itself is not united about the question of choice. Stuart Holt, chair of the Limbless Association, lost both his legs 18 years ago after contracting meningitis. I can't understand why anyone would want to. But, according to motivational speaker and amputee Eerez Avramov, the issue is about rights and choices for those who have lost limbs.
Three years after a car crash in Canada he elected to have his badly damaged right leg amputated. He asked surgeons to keep the limb so he could arrange for it to be cremated. Lord Uxbridge's leg was shattered by a cannon shot at the Battle of Waterloo. According to an anecdote, he was close to the Duke of Wellington when he was hit, and exclaimed: "By God, sir, I've lost my leg", to which Wellington replied: "By God, sir, so you have.
Uxbridge's amputated leg was buried and later became a tourist attraction. His story is said to be the inspiration for the phrase "one foot in the grave", which is how Uxbridge went on to describe his life after amputation.
In the graveyard of St Mary's church in Strata Florida, north Wales, is a headstone with a picture of a leg carved into it. The inscription reads: "The left leg and part of the thigh of Henry Hughes Cooper, was cut off and interr'd here, June 18, Apparently, the rest of Henry Hughes Cooper went to America and he was never reunited with the limb.
More will probably be added to that toll: at least nine of the 28 people sent to the Brigham and Women's Hospital have "limb threatening" wounds, according to a hospital spokesman.
That is the good news. The bad news is that the procedures can take a very long time and might not be worth it for some. This is how that works:.
If the right conditions are met—a big if—then the patient undergoes replantation surgery. First and foremost the patient has to be stabilized. At that point, the doctor evaluates the state of the amputated segment, the limb, the type of damage, and the injury. If it's damage the doctors think they can fix, the patient then undergoes hours worth of surgery, in which surgeons mend bones with plates and screws and reconnect tendons, nerves, vessels, and skin.
Afterwards, for precision, doctors will then further mend those tissues under a microscope. And that may just be the first of many surgeries in the process.
Time 's Nate Rawlings wrote about a veteran of Afghanistan who underwent 23 surgeries and six months of painful bone stretching to save his leg. Cendales said that his would be an extreme case. Human body parts are among hundreds of tons of waste from UK hospitals, which have been allowed to pile up by disposal company Healthcare Environment Services.
The company has been found to be in breach of its permits at five sites in England which deal with clinical waste and a criminal investigation has been launched. The Health Service Journal HSJ reported that amputated limbs and pharmaceutical waste were among the matter which had not been properly disposed of. Red Bags can help your facility develop a comprehensive medical waste disposal plan that adheres to all regulations, and yes, this includes amputated limbs.
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