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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In May of 2004, a twenty-three-year-old former Marine named Claudia Mitchell went for a ride on the back of a friend's motorcycle along State Highway 71, in western Arkansas, near where she had grown up. Soon they were going faster than she was comfortable with, and she remembers feeling more alarmed than she had felt during the ferocious sandstorms she endured in Kuwait, when she couldn't see her fingers. As she and her friend approached Mountainburg, she says, they took a sharp curve at high speed. The bike spun out of control. Mitchell was thrown, hit a guardrail, and came to rest, on her back, in a thicket. Her friend was unconscious. Mitchell felt extreme pain in her abdomen. (She later learned that her spleen had burst.) Volunteers from the local Fire Department arrived, and when an emergency medical technician found her she was desperately trying to extricate herself from the thicket.
"I kept saying, 'My arm isn't working! My arm isn't working!' " Mitchell recalled recently. "I was trying to push--it wasn't doing anything." Her arm--her left arm--wasn't working because it was over by the guardrail. It had been severed, just below the shoulder, on impact, although her brain continued to send signals to the primary motor nerves--the median, the ulnar, the radial, the musculocutaneous--that activate the muscles in the arm and hand. "I didn't understand why everybody kept saying there was something so seriously wrong," she went on. "I was in pain, but I didn't see any blood. The E.M.T. said, 'Yeah, honey, it's gone, but we found it.' " He put the arm in an ice chest and brought it to the hospital.
Mitchell spent the next three days heavily sedated. (Her friend had sustained major injuries and was unconscious for weeks.) When she regained full consciousness, she learned that her doctors had decided against reattaching the arm, for fear of infection. As her recovery progressed, she resolved to learn to live with the loss of limb, but her involuntary nervous system resisted. A week after leaving the hospital, while crawling underneath a desk to get at some computer cables, Mitchell reached out to grab one with her right arm. But it was her only load-bearing arm, and she fell hard into the wall, stump first. The next three months were filled with similar mishaps. "I was constantly falling on my shoulder or reaching for things with my little shoulder, and it wasn't going anywhere," she said.
In "Moby-Dick," Ahab complains of lingering pain in his missing leg, almost like a ghost, and the ship's carpenter remarks, "Yes, I have heard something curious on that score, sir; how that a dismasted man never entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it will be still pricking him at times." Mitchell, too, felt that somehow her arm was not so much gone as merely invisible--a phenomenon known as phantom limb. (Lord Nelson, having lost his right arm to cannon fire in 1797, considered his phantom fingers to be proof of the existence of a soul.) When Mitchell was fitted with a mechanical prosthesis, she tended to keep it bent at a ninety-degree angle, as though in a sling, giving visual representation to the posture of her throbbing phantom, which she was powerless to move.
Mitchell's prosthesis was a state-of-the-art battery-powered robotic arm that operated myoelectrically; that is, by using electrodes to amplify the electrical charges from muscle contractions and drive a motorized elbow or hand. It was heavy, however, and she found it slow, and cumbersome--nearly useless. Before long, she stopped wearing it, and learned to tie her shoes and to type using one hand. She got by. Her friends called her the Queen of Backspace.
The robotization of humans for medical purposes is in some respects already highly advanced. Cochlear implants replicate hearing through the electrical stimulation of auditory nerves, artificial retinas promise to undo the effects of blindness, and even automated bladder control for the incontinent is now available, at least in laboratory prototype. Medical researchers...
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