Speaker 1: Hi there everyone, it's me Josh and for this week's
Speaker 1: s Y s K Selex, I've chosen so your limbs
Speaker 1: torn off. Now what. It's a great classic episode filled
Speaker 1: with neat stories about things like exposed innards and sewing
Speaker 1: muscles together. It's a good one and it has a
Speaker 1: really great intro, if I do say so myself. It's
Speaker 1: from January, so enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know,
Speaker 1: a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
Speaker 1: Charles w Chuck Bryant and this is stuff you should
Speaker 1: know because Jerry's over there, King, are you doing buddy?
Speaker 1: Besides sick, I'm not sick. I'm just I've got a
Speaker 1: little bit of a bug. But well do you think
Speaker 1: that's the first step? And yeah, and being sick is
Speaker 1: saying I'm sick. I definitely believe in psycho somad effects.
Speaker 1: You know, the mine has an impact on the body. Well,
Speaker 1: if you can be a hypochondria, actually you can do
Speaker 1: the opposite, right, yeah, yeah, you can will yourself into
Speaker 1: not being Anyway, people, the show must go on, And
Speaker 1: I just want to point out how dedicated my partner.
Speaker 1: Here's to his craft. Well, I also want to say,
Speaker 1: I want to promise that it's not going to be
Speaker 1: like the great six weeks of No. You don't get
Speaker 1: that was back in the old days, the unhealthy days.
Speaker 1: I smoked and everything. Yeah, your body didn't know how
Speaker 1: to heal, so it was enjoying nicotine. Now I'm just
Speaker 1: like I'm I'm not getting sick. I said it to
Speaker 1: myself last night, and here I am better than you
Speaker 1: ever Josh two point oh, thank you. All right, let's
Speaker 1: do this, Okay, are you ready? Yeah, I got a
Speaker 1: story for you. I bet I know it. I'll bet
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah. You saw. His name is Everett Knowles Jr.
Speaker 1: But everybody called him Eddie two days in a why
Speaker 1: I find the unwholesome. Yeah, and I didn't know Eddie
Speaker 1: could be short forever never heard that. I don't think
Speaker 1: it is. I think he just didn't like his name, Okay,
Speaker 1: because it seems like you should call him every yeah
Speaker 1: or heavy ev yea of the big ee something. So
Speaker 1: he was a little either. He's a little guy, tiny
Speaker 1: like a little Elvis. Uh. Well, Eddie, we'll call him
Speaker 1: Eddie because that's what he preferred to be called sure.
Speaker 1: He was walking home from school one day in Somerville, Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: which is a suburb of Boston, and he was walking
Speaker 1: along the railroad tracks and there just happened to be
Speaker 1: a train loaded with gravel hauling out of the area
Speaker 1: very slowly while he was walking alongside, and said, you
Speaker 1: know what, I'm just gonna have a little thrill right
Speaker 1: now and grab onto this train. And he did. He
Speaker 1: successfully grabbed onto the train, was hanging with I believe
Speaker 1: his right arm. Yeah, and uh was having the time
Speaker 1: of his life just dangling there when he misjudged the
Speaker 1: distance between the train side the train and the side
Speaker 1: of a tunnel and he was pulled into the tunnel support,
Speaker 1: smacked it and hung on for a second before he
Speaker 1: was dropped off of the train. The train kept going
Speaker 1: through the tunnel, leaving Eddie kind of crumpled and in
Speaker 1: a little shivering mass at the mouth of the tunnel.
Speaker 1: So he stands up and he grabs his arm. He's like, oh,
Speaker 1: my arm doesn't feel very good, and he starts walking
Speaker 1: toward town and apparently he walked about a hundred yards
Speaker 1: uphill when some workers saw him and said, grab that kid.
Speaker 1: Because he was covered in blood, he was staggering, he
Speaker 1: looked like he was out of He's clearly in shocks.
Speaker 1: They grabbed it, ran and got a woman, because at
Speaker 1: the time, this is n two, a woman was the
Speaker 1: only one who could provide any kind of initial emergency care.
Speaker 1: Um and a clerk at I believe some sort of
Speaker 1: warehouse um came out and started to apply pressure to
Speaker 1: this boy's wound. But she had a little bit of trouble.
Speaker 1: When she tried to close the wound with a tournique,
Speaker 1: she found that his arm was an attached to his
Speaker 1: body any longer. He's just kind of holding it there.
Speaker 1: Very Luckily he was wearing a jacket, or else his
Speaker 1: arm would have been back at the mouth of the tunnel. Man.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine, like the guy is holding his arm
Speaker 1: basically to keep it from falling out of his jacket,
Speaker 1: although he didn't know that, you know, no, he didn't.
Speaker 1: He was in shock. Luckily, he was still lucid enough
Speaker 1: to like tell everybody who he was, where he lived,
Speaker 1: and uh. They called the the hospital, and the hospital
Speaker 1: scrambled some surgeons. But it wasn't until chuck Um he
Speaker 1: got to the hospital and they started cutting his jacket
Speaker 1: off that they realized the extent of the damage. This
Speaker 1: kid's arm was torn clean off. But the operative word
Speaker 1: is clean. Yeah, he's right, because Eddie Everett Knowls Jr.
Speaker 1: Of Somerville, Mass On what May nineteen sixty two, became
Speaker 1: the first recipient of a full successful limb reattachments, first
Speaker 1: human recipient. Right. Yeah, it's a good point. They had
Speaker 1: done that before dogs successfully, and they had they had
Speaker 1: done all the different surgeries that are required to reattach
Speaker 1: a limb, but they had never done all of them
Speaker 1: at once. Like they'd reattach the nerves, they'd reattach bone,
Speaker 1: they'd reattached blood vessels, but they had never had a
Speaker 1: full amputation and a human being successfully reattached. And um.
Speaker 1: From what I read, the doctor was I don't know
Speaker 1: about excited, but they had been looking for a case
Speaker 1: because they thought, like, I think we can do this.
Speaker 1: We just need the right case, right exactly, you know.
Speaker 1: And he called his buddy and he's like, I think
Speaker 1: we got one. Get in there. They got the They
Speaker 1: like you said, they'd successfully reattached artery's nerves, bone, that
Speaker 1: kind of thing, but never all never the whole shebang.
Speaker 1: So they said, well, we know how to do this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if somebody will just come along and present us with
Speaker 1: an arm pulled leanly off, especially a twelve year old,
Speaker 1: because that definitely worked at his advantage. Apparently an artery
Speaker 1: when severed will plug itself up, especially in younger kids.
Speaker 1: That plugging is way more successful and happens more quickly.
Speaker 1: So this kid just basically presented like the perfect case.
Speaker 1: The main artery I guess it is brachial artery leading
Speaker 1: out of his shoulder was a full like two inches
Speaker 1: out of the wounds. So like they had a lot
Speaker 1: to work with and work they did. Uh yeah, and
Speaker 1: they the arm was on ice and they began working immediately.
Speaker 1: This is mass general by the way, and um, they
Speaker 1: started with the arteries and veins, and then the nurse felt, well,
Speaker 1: they all sort of saw color and they described as
Speaker 1: a glow kind of came back into the arm. This
Speaker 1: kid hopped the train, had his arm pulled off, and
Speaker 1: within two and a half hours they had gotten circulation back. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the nurse scrabbed the hand and said, hey, it's warm.
Speaker 1: That's good, spink and warm. She shook it, made it
Speaker 1: do the metal sign everybody in the operating theory is laughing.
Speaker 1: The bone and the muscle and the nerve and the
Speaker 1: skin um happened in in later surgeries, and the I
Speaker 1: think the nerve. They made a pretty important decision at
Speaker 1: the time was to wait on that altogether, uh, and
Speaker 1: let it heal some more first, which is as it
Speaker 1: turns out. Actually, as it turns out, most of this
Speaker 1: was sort of how they do it today. Like they
Speaker 1: perfected the process from that point through the seventies and
Speaker 1: in the eighties is when they really started like humming
Speaker 1: with limb reattachment. The only difference that I saw was
Speaker 1: and we'll get into it a little more, but um.
Speaker 1: They reattached the arteries first to get circulation, I guess
Speaker 1: to keep from more and more tissue dying. Um. And
Speaker 1: then they reattached the bone by driving a screw and
Speaker 1: using a hammer they nail the screw into the marrow.
Speaker 1: And then reattached the arm bone. That what is that femur?
Speaker 1: No femurs in the leg the leg You think I
Speaker 1: would looked this up already, Yeah, the upper arm bone.
Speaker 1: Then they drove that into the other end of the
Speaker 1: crew normally now though they do they reattach the bone
Speaker 1: for supervide stability, so when you reattach the arteries and
Speaker 1: veins and stuff, they won't pull away. Yeah, and he
Speaker 1: uh it was a success story because he ended up
Speaker 1: he was uh he couldn't use that hand as his
Speaker 1: dominant hand any longer, which just said because he was
Speaker 1: a good picture. Yeah, but he um was able to
Speaker 1: eventually get enough use out of it to where, uh
Speaker 1: they said about like a left hander would have use
Speaker 1: of his right hand. So he just sort of had
Speaker 1: to switch that up. But for nineteen sixty two, that's
Speaker 1: pretty successful, especially considering in nineteen sixty was the very
Speaker 1: first microsurgery performed just two years previously at the University
Speaker 1: of Vermont. Oh yeah, go catamounts. But um, that's dedication
Speaker 1: so microso surgery, that's really what we're talking about here.
Speaker 1: It's the use of a microscope to perform surgery. And
Speaker 1: when you're attaching, you're essentially sewing together little nerves and
Speaker 1: blood vessels like a millimeter in diameter. You need a
Speaker 1: microscope and a tiny, tiny little needle, right, and you're
Speaker 1: using tiny, tiny little sutra thread which is about is
Speaker 1: is as big as a hair. That's the stuff you're
Speaker 1: using to to suture these blood vessels back together. It's
Speaker 1: not catgut, no, And it's an extremely involved um surgery
Speaker 1: as you can imagine, but it's step by step. It's
Speaker 1: like first you do the blood vessels, then you do
Speaker 1: the arteries, UM, and you do muscles, ligaments, tendons, all
Speaker 1: this stuff, and you're doing it in this this process.
Speaker 1: But each each surgery, each part of the procedure is
Speaker 1: like an enormous surgery in and of itself. So like UM,
Speaker 1: a limb reattachment which is called um replantation. I thought
Speaker 1: it was be called like limbery or something. Some people
Speaker 1: call it that. I'm a limberist. The saucier doctors call
Speaker 1: it limbery, but UM, it usually is like as on
Speaker 1: a whole. The replantation surgery can last like an entire day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's intensive, UM And I read too that it
Speaker 1: uh the whole micro surgery. The concept of using a
Speaker 1: microscope for surgery was not accepted at first, Like doctors
Speaker 1: and surgeons were like, no, like you, we can't do that.
Speaker 1: We have to look with our eyes, and so it
Speaker 1: had to be perfected sort of on the fringe by
Speaker 1: doctor by surgeons who are willing to like accept this
Speaker 1: might be the future an experiment in their basements. I guess,
Speaker 1: so on hapless victim maybe or dogs. Yeah, I didn't
Speaker 1: get the and I didn't look it up, but I
Speaker 1: didn't get the impression from this article one way or
Speaker 1: the other how dogs lost their limbs to begin with, Like,
Speaker 1: was it accidental and they're like, okay, well this we'll
Speaker 1: reattach it. Or were they cutting dogs limbs off and
Speaker 1: then reattaching them, because I'm guessing it was probably the
Speaker 1: ladder probably. Yeah, I mean we've talked plenty about that
Speaker 1: kind of topic because I mean, think about it. Why
Speaker 1: would dogs limbs be pulled off in any more frequency
Speaker 1: than humans limbs and hence present more cases to practice on.
Speaker 1: I think they were cutting off dog's limbs and then reattaching,
Speaker 1: which is messed up. Yeah it is. So you were
Speaker 1: talking about microsurgery. What I saw was um replacing toes
Speaker 1: for thumbs. Got big sixties. That was a big one.
Speaker 1: So you had a a thumb on your foot or
Speaker 1: a big toe on your hand, big toe on your hand,
Speaker 1: because apparently fifty to seventy of all the utility in
Speaker 1: your hand is in your thumb. And if you're missing
Speaker 1: a thumb, you might as well just not have your hand.
Speaker 1: You don't need a big toe quite as much. You
Speaker 1: can use a cane or something like that. Thanks to
Speaker 1: your new toe thumb and um that that became perfected
Speaker 1: in the sixties toe thumb. That's a good band name. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And then in the seven these um free flat tissue
Speaker 1: transfer became a big thing, which is basically going to
Speaker 1: a part of your body, harvesting an area of your
Speaker 1: body like under your thigh, your abdomen um, I think
Speaker 1: you're back, lower back, and then just basically taking the
Speaker 1: gap and sewing it back together, right, so you have
Speaker 1: a scar, but you also have a portion of your
Speaker 1: body that's diminished in size. Um, and then taking that
Speaker 1: and using it to basically do what we understand as
Speaker 1: a skin graft, which which requires microsurgery as well. Um,
Speaker 1: it's just basically taking this part here and putting it
Speaker 1: back over here where there's a bunch of damage and
Speaker 1: reattaching all of the nerves and the blood vessels and everything. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I saw when I was looking up photos of this
Speaker 1: kind of thing, I came across something that I had
Speaker 1: never seen before. And I didn't. I didn't get the story,
Speaker 1: but you could almost. I mean I sort of gathered
Speaker 1: what was going on just from the photo series. But
Speaker 1: up someone was degloved on the on their fingers basically
Speaker 1: from like the hand knuckles forward. All the fingers had
Speaker 1: no skin, and they from the looks of it, they
Speaker 1: inserted it into an arm, like into a bicep, the
Speaker 1: fingers and like they lived there for a while, like
Speaker 1: inserted under the skin of the arm, and that that
Speaker 1: skin they later would remove the fingers and it came
Speaker 1: off as like a big flat skin graph like sticking
Speaker 1: your hand in an envelope, and uh, eventually formed like
Speaker 1: webbed fingers and then fingers. That is crazy, But like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, man, I just saw these photos. I
Speaker 1: should have done. I mean, it doesn't really have anything
Speaker 1: to do with this, but it was just remarkable they
Speaker 1: see someone with their fingers stuck in their bicep under
Speaker 1: the skin. Like, I'm having trouble visualizing this. I need
Speaker 1: to see these photos. Yeah, I'll dick him up the
Speaker 1: show to you. Yeah, if you want to see some
Speaker 1: really gross stuff, you can just google. Um. Microsurgery or
Speaker 1: replantation is another one man it's just nasty stuff out,
Speaker 1: but amazing like that they can. And I looked at
Speaker 1: so many of them. I kind of got to that
Speaker 1: point where I was like, well, this isn't gross. This
Speaker 1: is what the body looks like without skin sometimes, and
Speaker 1: which is gross. Nuts. I wouldn't grossed out bodies without
Speaker 1: skin or gross. I don't think so. I think. I
Speaker 1: think it's the beauty inside. You couldn't desensitize my friend. Well,
Speaker 1: before we get any further, Chuck, let's do a message break,
Speaker 1: because I got some good stuff coming up. So, Chuck,
Speaker 1: we understand microsurgery. Now it's frankensteiny in right, Yeah, you're
Speaker 1: basically just sewing stuff together. Yeah, because I mean, like,
Speaker 1: let's say you have a dead person who has a
Speaker 1: great hand and you have a live person who's got
Speaker 1: a poor hand. You cut off the live person's hand,
Speaker 1: cut off the dead person's hand, and attached the live
Speaker 1: or the dead person's hand and a live person. That's
Speaker 1: that's Frankensteinian. That's what they're doing. And it's pretty cool cool. Um,
Speaker 1: but if this ever happens to you, if if say
Speaker 1: you have a poor hand and that it's no longer
Speaker 1: attached to your wrist. Yeah, that hand sucks, right and
Speaker 1: it's all crushed and damaged or whatever. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: let's say it's intact. And you say, you know what,
Speaker 1: I think through my shock that I might be a
Speaker 1: good candidate for replantation of my hand. What do you do? Well,
Speaker 1: you want to call nine one one immediately, because that's
Speaker 1: just the first thing you do. You get, go ahead
Speaker 1: and get folks on the way, or you can ask
Speaker 1: someone with you to call nine one. That's not putting
Speaker 1: anyone out. Yeah that's true. If you can't dial, maybe
Speaker 1: you don't have hands, right, you can tell Sirie to
Speaker 1: call nine one one. Job. Yeah, I actually changed my
Speaker 1: series to a dude, so it's not a hurt anymore
Speaker 1: to an englishman. Actually, yeah, it's kind of fun Reginald.
Speaker 1: I don't know what his name is actually, but he'll
Speaker 1: say stuff like, you know, I'll say call Josh and
Speaker 1: he'll say ringing Josh, oh yeah, instead of calling Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's classy, kind of fun. Anyway, Um, you want to
Speaker 1: dial nine one one, get them on the way, and
Speaker 1: then immediately you want to just try and stabilize the patient.
Speaker 1: You want to stop the bleeding, either with heavy pressure
Speaker 1: or a tourniquet above the wound like a sixties female. Yeah, exactly. Uh.
Speaker 1: And once you get the patient um stabilize and they're
Speaker 1: not going to bleed out there in the kitchen or
Speaker 1: wherever it is. Um. You want to get the digit
Speaker 1: or the hand or the limb and put it on ice,
Speaker 1: but not directly on ice. Put it in a bag
Speaker 1: and then put that bag on ice. Yeah, you want
Speaker 1: to pack pack it in ice as much ice as
Speaker 1: you can find, but you want to make sure that
Speaker 1: in the bag that you put the the hand or
Speaker 1: the digit or whatever in there's no ice and there's
Speaker 1: no water because wall or causes it to shrivel, and
Speaker 1: that means you won't be able to reattach it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and ice you can actually if I put if I
Speaker 1: cut off my finger and I threw it in a
Speaker 1: bucket of ice, it could actually get frostbite. Yeah. That's crazy.
Speaker 1: That is crazy, but it's also pretty cool. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: you don't want frostbite on your because you know you
Speaker 1: won't be able to use it anymore. Now. Frostbite is
Speaker 1: just um dead tissue brought about by exposure to extreme cold.
Speaker 1: That's right. So after the teacher right there. It is.
Speaker 1: After you've got it on the ice, in the bag
Speaker 1: on the ice, you've called mine one one, you've got
Speaker 1: the bleeding stopped. You want to cross whatever fingers you
Speaker 1: have remaining and hope that you've got a good hospital
Speaker 1: nearby with some surgeons that aren't doing much at the
Speaker 1: moment or who are willing to cancel their schedules and
Speaker 1: say let's go do this. Yeah, get off the golf course.
Speaker 1: So when you get to the hospital, there's some things
Speaker 1: you can expect. If all of your surgeons have coming
Speaker 1: from the golf course, they should be ready and waiting
Speaker 1: for you. And Um, like we said, for they're going
Speaker 1: to reattach the bone to provide stability um for the
Speaker 1: rest of the surgery. And there's probably still going to
Speaker 1: be a little bit of a gap there because they
Speaker 1: need to get in there. Um. And then they start
Speaker 1: reattaching your your blood vessels, and just like with Eddie Knowles, um,
Speaker 1: that just gets you know, the blood flow going and
Speaker 1: essentially makes that limb alive once more, right well, and
Speaker 1: it also keeps it from further dying. Um. Because Chuck,
Speaker 1: it turns out that like there is a finite amount
Speaker 1: of time which is understandable, but we we are aware
Speaker 1: of how much time a limb can just sit around
Speaker 1: in the hot sun starting to go you know, fit it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there's so for example, Um, if you have a
Speaker 1: whole arm or a whole leg cut off, remember death Proof. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that girl has her legs like sticking out of the
Speaker 1: window and mad Mike is that his name Kurt Russell?
Speaker 1: When he some and her legs goes. Um. If she
Speaker 1: had survived and her leg just laid there out at
Speaker 1: room temperature, um, it could have been good for six
Speaker 1: to twelve hours. I imagine you're really pushing it at
Speaker 1: twelve hours. But if say you have somebody who's like
Speaker 1: this leg needs to be put on ice and does
Speaker 1: everything right, it could stay refrigerated for four days and
Speaker 1: still be reattached. Yeah. Um. They point out though in
Speaker 1: this article, ideally you're having that surgery that day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but if you within hours, within minutes, they're talking ideally Basically,
Speaker 1: the sooner the better. As soon as they're ready to go,
Speaker 1: you should be ready to go as well. But you're right, Um,
Speaker 1: if that is not the case and you have uh,
Speaker 1: some good refrigeration going on, you can last for about
Speaker 1: four days. Yeah, and apparently it's not even necessarily the
Speaker 1: skin tissue that um that leads to problems and reattachment
Speaker 1: after being exposed or room temperature. It's muscle degradation. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: interest thing. Uh. So you you get there, you're getting
Speaker 1: your surgery done. Um, you probably are going to expect
Speaker 1: to go through that first long surgery bone reattachment, blood vessel,
Speaker 1: maybe some muscle fiber and sure, and then they'll say
Speaker 1: we'll put the nerves off for later. Um. And then
Speaker 1: later on down the road will be a skin graft
Speaker 1: of some kind, like a UM free flap surgery like
Speaker 1: I was talking about. And the free uh refers to
Speaker 1: the the free like this part of this tissue from
Speaker 1: your body has been removed the donor site. Oh, it's
Speaker 1: not the cost of the surgery, it's it's been cut free. Right,
Speaker 1: And then you have that makes sense and then UM,
Speaker 1: it really is simpler than you think. It's reattaching and
Speaker 1: hopefully everything takes and you fight the infection off and
Speaker 1: you start the rehab process, which, UM, it takes a
Speaker 1: long time, and it's it's grueling and not fun. It
Speaker 1: can be weird at first. Uh. They point out the
Speaker 1: article and be weird to look down and see your
Speaker 1: army attached. But I imagine no weirder than looking down
Speaker 1: and seeing your arm not attached. You know, it would
Speaker 1: probably be a comfort to see it reattached. But you're
Speaker 1: a jerk if you're like, oh, it's kind of crooked. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but apparently sometimes it can feel a little different, and
Speaker 1: uh that can be a little strange and off putting.
Speaker 1: It's not like, oh, I'm just like I was before, right,
Speaker 1: you know, better than ever? Um and Tom wrote this
Speaker 1: one my good friend time chief, he said. He also
Speaker 1: talked about something called cross transfer. This was mind blowing,
Speaker 1: which is basically like if if just re plantation is Frankensteinian,
Speaker 1: this is even more so. Yeah, I didn't quite get
Speaker 1: the purpose of the hand. Uh, Basically, you're getting a
Speaker 1: a left hand on your right arm. Let's say, Uh,
Speaker 1: so your thumb and your pinky would be in weird places, right,
Speaker 1: your palms still facing the right direction, but thumb is switched. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but what's what's the point of that if you have
Speaker 1: a bad hand and a good hand. I don't know
Speaker 1: if that's they only had like a left hand available
Speaker 1: at the time. I don't know that one. I got
Speaker 1: the other one where basically they take your lower leg
Speaker 1: beneath your knee. So like, if your upper leg is
Speaker 1: damaged and your lower leg is fine, let's just say
Speaker 1: your upper leg is wasted for whatever reason, but your
Speaker 1: lower leg is fine. They'll cut it off, the lower
Speaker 1: leg and basically turn it around right, and then your
Speaker 1: knee becomes locked. Your calf muscles then serve the function
Speaker 1: that your thigh muscles used to, and your knee joint
Speaker 1: is now in your ankle. Then you also are going
Speaker 1: to be wearing a prosthetic obviously because you have no
Speaker 1: thime muscles um and you're turned around foot which is
Speaker 1: now backwards. Is extra support for that prosthetic foot or leg,
Speaker 1: your limb. It's pretty cool. It's basically saying, like, how
Speaker 1: can we take this and use it to even better
Speaker 1: utility now that its original purpose has been destroyed? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty cool. Yeah. I tried to find photos of
Speaker 1: a cross transferred hand, but I couldn't find any photos,
Speaker 1: and weirdly, pictures of Madonna kept popping up. Does she
Speaker 1: have something I don't know? Dude? Like, I tried all
Speaker 1: sorts of Google searches. And she images of her kept
Speaker 1: popping up, So I don't know, maybe she's got two
Speaker 1: left feet or something. She does not what was said
Speaker 1: in uh Waiting for Guffman. Uh he literally had two
Speaker 1: left feet. It was kind of a dumb joke, was it?
Speaker 1: I thought it was. Yeah, So, Josh, that's one way
Speaker 1: we talked about microsurgery. But there's perhaps another even better way,
Speaker 1: which will cover right after this message break. Al Right,
Speaker 1: so we've discussed how you can have surgery, but there
Speaker 1: may be an actual way to regrow things. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is far, by far the more preferable of the two. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like fingers, but not like you know, you can't lose
Speaker 1: a whole finger and regrow. It's got to be above
Speaker 1: the bone. Like let's say you get the tip of
Speaker 1: your finger, like your fingernail cut off right and you
Speaker 1: can't find it. And even better, this just involves like
Speaker 1: dumping a magic powder on that that wound. So if
Speaker 1: you if you have your finger cut off below the nail,
Speaker 1: right below the nail, which happened to a guy in Cincinnati,
Speaker 1: um in two thousand and five who owned a hobby shop. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I used to love those places, man, I go in
Speaker 1: and be like, I just want all the model airplanes
Speaker 1: and everything. Yeah, Eddie's Trick Shop in Atlanta was my
Speaker 1: go to, which I've just discovered still exists. Um, not
Speaker 1: too far from my house. Is it a magic shop?
Speaker 1: It's it's like everything. Like they had models and had
Speaker 1: magic kits, they had you know, whoopee cushions was sort
Speaker 1: of like a catch all. Yeah. I liked both of those,
Speaker 1: but I never went to one that was the same. Yeah. Anyway, Um,
Speaker 1: this guy, this hobby shop owner, as far as we know,
Speaker 1: he sold no magic items. Um, he was demonstrating why
Speaker 1: a motor was very dangerous in an RC plane. He
Speaker 1: did a good job, I guess, and cut his finger off,
Speaker 1: and uh apparently his brother was had something to do
Speaker 1: with finger with tissue regeneration and said, yeah, he was
Speaker 1: in the biz. Yeah. And the guy went to the
Speaker 1: doctor the hospital, and doctors like, we'll give you a
Speaker 1: skin graft to just kind of cover this weirdness, but um,
Speaker 1: you know, you lost your finger t s. And the
Speaker 1: guy's brother was like, don't give the skin graph just yet.
Speaker 1: Come over. I'll give you a beer, and UM, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna put some I'm gonna put some something that's called
Speaker 1: extracellular matrix on your wound, and let's see what happens.
Speaker 1: And they did, Yeah, and magic happened. Then it regrew.
Speaker 1: The guy not only regrew his finger, he regrew apparently
Speaker 1: not the bone, but very surprisingly the nail bed and fingernail,
Speaker 1: which apparently, like you don't grow a nail bed back,
Speaker 1: Like even if you cut off just the tip of
Speaker 1: your finger, like that, nail beds never growing back. This
Speaker 1: guy's nail bed grow back. That's awesome. Yeah. Extra cellular
Speaker 1: matrix is awesome. Um. That's basically like the glue that
Speaker 1: holds ourselves together. And um, not just us, plants and
Speaker 1: animals and trees and they all have it uh in it. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's functions outside the body cells. That's why it's called
Speaker 1: extra cellular obviously. And it's collagen. We talked a lot
Speaker 1: about collagen, the protein that's um, you know, super good
Speaker 1: for all kinds of things, especially growing skin. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: you know it's in skin cream and stuff like that. Sure. Um,
Speaker 1: so typically what they use is uh, this was a
Speaker 1: powder from pig bladder. But um, I've seen I saw
Speaker 1: a video on the New York Time site that showed
Speaker 1: how they do it today. And this is mainly for um. Like, Uh,
Speaker 1: let's say you got you didn't want a skin graft
Speaker 1: for some reason, or it wasn't possible to get a
Speaker 1: skin graft and you you've lost all the skin on
Speaker 1: your thigh. They would get a pig bladder and they
Speaker 1: they spread it out and they remove all the cells basically, yeah,
Speaker 1: because this stuff doesn't have pig cells. No, don't harvested
Speaker 1: from a pig body. Yeah, but they still remove the
Speaker 1: cells in all the DNA with like a chemical bath,
Speaker 1: and basically what's remaining is the matrix in it. They
Speaker 1: end up drying it out and it looks like and
Speaker 1: cut it into sheets and it looks like a sheet
Speaker 1: of like parchment paper and then they will put that
Speaker 1: on your leg and it immediately just starts going to work. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They used to think that extracellular matrix was just something
Speaker 1: that provided structure for cells to grow around like a
Speaker 1: fetal in the fetus. Yeah, because if you're if you're
Speaker 1: in the fetus and like something happens, you lose a toe.
Speaker 1: If you are a fetus, if you're in the fetal
Speaker 1: position in the womb and you lose a toe, that
Speaker 1: toes growing back. Yeah, you know, you grow a vestigial
Speaker 1: tail that goes away. Your feet and hands start out
Speaker 1: being webbed, so you're growing a lot of stuff and
Speaker 1: then getting rid of it. But you can also regrows
Speaker 1: stuff that you're not supposed to lose up to the
Speaker 1: age of about two, and then I think the general
Speaker 1: ideas that the extra show matrix just kind of goes
Speaker 1: dormant in humans, right, But they thought that it was
Speaker 1: just structure, and then they realize that no, this is
Speaker 1: actually creating some sort of signal to the rest of
Speaker 1: the body to say, hey, don't scar regrow instead, And
Speaker 1: it goes and recruits stem cells and says, come over here,
Speaker 1: and let's rebuild this finger. This hobby shop accident was
Speaker 1: too ironic. Let's reward this man with a regrown finger,
Speaker 1: and don't forget the nail bed. That's what ex cellular
Speaker 1: matrix says to everything else. Yeah, and it's uh, it's
Speaker 1: pretty cool. The problem with um why you can't normally
Speaker 1: just regrow a finger is because when something like that happens,
Speaker 1: the trauma happens, your body says it recognizes it, and
Speaker 1: the immune system kicks in and it's gonna swell up
Speaker 1: and get inflamed, and scar tissue is gonna start to form,
Speaker 1: and extra cellular matrix prevents the inflammation, prevents scar tissue
Speaker 1: from forming and basically tells the body like, no, I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna grow like normally, right, not scar tissue, just
Speaker 1: regular old cells. But like you said, after a certain age,
Speaker 1: it just goes away, Like we have the extra cellular
Speaker 1: matrix still, but it's function or its ability to trigger
Speaker 1: regrowth is just becomes dormant or something happens to it.
Speaker 1: And with this pick bladder stuff, um, they're they're starting
Speaker 1: to wonder, is there a way that we can just
Speaker 1: trigger this naturally in the body. And if that's the case,
Speaker 1: then say hello to regrowing a whole head. I mean
Speaker 1: you never know, because they pointed out that like deer
Speaker 1: can regrow antlers and um, things like that, and they're
Speaker 1: so different than us cellularly, right because it has bone, cartilage, yeah, skin, sure, Um,
Speaker 1: all those things are in your hand, your arm, your leg,
Speaker 1: and you would need to regrow all those two for
Speaker 1: something to really be considered regrown. You can't just regrow
Speaker 1: the leg but not the bone. It'd still be impressive,
Speaker 1: but you're like it's kind of flopping there. Have you
Speaker 1: ever seen the picture of that UFC fighter who's like
Speaker 1: kicking the guy and he breaks his own leg and
Speaker 1: it's just like almost like a cartoon or mcgahey. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: well it's mcgahey. Yeah. Yeah, that's stuff. UM triggers the
Speaker 1: old mirror neurons big time. Makes me weak. Uh So
Speaker 1: that's basically I mean, they've they've been experimenting with war
Speaker 1: veterans Iraqi war veterans. Uh. And actually the New York
Speaker 1: Times video, I saw that it was a war veteran
Speaker 1: who was having this done to his thigh. Yeah right,
Speaker 1: I think it was skin and tendons and yeah, and
Speaker 1: it was you know, it looked an early but it
Speaker 1: was functioning and that counts. You got anything else? No,
Speaker 1: I think that's it. There's literally nothing else to say
Speaker 1: about I agree, sir. All right. Uh well, then if
Speaker 1: you want to learn more about replantation, you can type
Speaker 1: that word into the search bar how stuff works dot
Speaker 1: com and it'll bring up a couple of cool things
Speaker 1: at the very least. Also, UM, type in extracellular matrix,
Speaker 1: which is pretty cool sounding. Um, and that'll bring up
Speaker 1: another article too. And uh since I said those things,
Speaker 1: it's time for listener mail. That's right, I'm gonna call
Speaker 1: this correction. You get these from time to time, and
Speaker 1: we like to read him. Yeah, from time to time.
Speaker 1: Hey guys, Jerry loved the work you do. I love
Speaker 1: listening to the show. I wanted to write in though,
Speaker 1: with a correction regarding Lewis and Clark. I'm working towards
Speaker 1: my PhD in art history and I am particularly interested
Speaker 1: in the history of medicine and disease. On the middle
Speaker 1: of the show, Josh mentioned that the Adventure Party inadvertently
Speaker 1: discovered syphilis had not been known to Europeans up to
Speaker 1: that point. This is actually not the quite the case.
Speaker 1: Syphilis goes back pretty far in European history. It was
Speaker 1: first documented in the late fifteenth century after a conflict
Speaker 1: between France and Italy, and remained an issue for europe
Speaker 1: peaking around the mid nineteenth century. Nineteenth century. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: Josh did have part of it right though, when he
Speaker 1: said that the party blamed it on Native American groups.
Speaker 1: Early on, everyone wanted to blame the disease on everyone else.
Speaker 1: No surprises here. But after that initial conflict, the French
Speaker 1: referred to syphilis as the Neapolitan sickness, while the Italians
Speaker 1: named it the French sickness, a trend that continued as
Speaker 1: the stuff spread. You you if you're interested. It's really
Speaker 1: fascinating stuff, especially the cures that became popular. Mercury was
Speaker 1: a really nasty one. History of Syphilis by Claude Catel
Speaker 1: is a pretty good reference. She read a book called
Speaker 1: the History of Syphilis. Somebody wrote a book called the
Speaker 1: History of Syphilis. Anyway, I just wanted and that was
Speaker 1: Claude q u e accent of Google t e L.
Speaker 1: So he's French. That is nice. Isn't that what that's called?
Speaker 1: I don't remember anymore. I don't either. Anybody just wanted
Speaker 1: to put it out. Car song. Yeah, that is from Katherine.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, Kathleen Pierce into disease. Thanks very very in
Speaker 1: paintings about disease. I guess so thanks a lot for
Speaker 1: letting us know that. Kathleen. I feel like I've been
Speaker 1: set straight. Uh. If you want to set us straight,
Speaker 1: we like to be corrected, right, Yeah, and nothing better. Uh.
Speaker 1: All you have to do is tweet to us to
Speaker 1: initiate contact. You can tweet to us using our handle
Speaker 1: s y s K podcast. You can go on to Facebook.
Speaker 1: That's another great way to contact us. Yeah, you can
Speaker 1: complain there. Uh, we people love doing that. We're at
Speaker 1: Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know. You can
Speaker 1: send us an email to stuff Podcasts at how stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com and although you can't complain, uh, you
Speaker 1: can enjoy our website Stuff you Shouldn't dot Com. Stuff
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