Chop chop! Severed body parts can really show a person's true colors. Chop Logic by D. Trull Enigma Editor dtrull@parascope.com One macabre theme running through the canon of horror story folklore always seems to cut us right to the quick: the traumatic act of vital body parts getting chopped off. Psychologically speaking, dismemberment reminds us that the human body is only so much walking meat, shattering our delicately constructed integrity of self. Plus, we know it must hurt like almighty crap. The magical survival of decapitation appears in horror tales from "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" to "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and the symbolic loss of a hand figures in the mythologies of Captain Hook, Luke Skywalker and Agent Alex Krycek. Each of these mortifying motifs has recently surfaced in a frightful real-life medical drama, revealing two remarkable insights on the human condition. These are the tales of the man who chopped off his hand and then sued after it wasn't reattached (because he refused to let doctors do it), and the woman who lived after having her head cut off (because she wanted doctors to do it). Thomas Passmore is a former computer specialist who has long suffered from psychotic disorders and alcoholism. He had spent a lengthy period mired in unemployment and homelessness without his prescribed psychoactive medication when he landed a construction job in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. On his first day of work in April of 1994, Passmore hallucinated the number "666" appearing on his right hand. "It meant that I was evil," Passmore later testified in court. He said he recalled the Bible verse "If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee," and felt compelled to obey its advice. Passmore used an electric table saw at the job site to shear off his supposedly Satanic fist. His coworkers immediately packed the severed hand in an ice chest and had him flown to Sentara Norfolk General Hospital in Virginia. He initially consented to have the hand surgically reattached, but then changed his mind in the operating room. "I said it's against my religion," Passmore explained in court, where he was sworn in raising his right hook. "If you sew it back on, I'll cut it off again," he reportedly told Dr. Tad Grenga, the hand surgeon who tended to him. After fighting with Passmore for permission to repair the self-inflicted damage, Grenga finally consulted with Circuit Judge William F. Rutherford on whether he could legally perform the surgery without the patient's consent. Rutherford ruled that Passmore was competent to make an informed decision, and that he could sue Grenga for assault and battery if he proceeded to reattach the hand. Reluctantly, Grenga sealed the wound without reattaching the hand, in accordance with the patient's bizarre demands. Passmore sued anyway. Claiming that he was experiencing a psychotic episode throughout the event which rendered him incapable of informed decisions, he sued the hospital and Dr. Grenga for failing to recognize his impaired state and disregard his expressed wishes. Passmore sought malpractice compensation in the amount of $3 million. He ended up losing the lawsuit, and despite its overwhelming weirdness, his case is all too ordinary as a legal action in which there are no real winners. Bridget Fudgell is a former secretary who has long suffered from a bone disorder called ankylosing spondylitis, a rheumatic condition which progressively fuses bones in the spine together, leaving neck movement impossible. After she broke her neck in a fall four years ago, her head became locked in an awkward position facing downward and slightly to the right. "I had become a recluse," Fudgell said of her debilitating condition following the accident, which doctors then told her was inoperable. "I was too scared to go out and I couldn't cross the road because I couldn't see straight ahead. Everyday things were impossible." After studying her plight, neurosurgeon Steve Gill of Frenchay Hospital in Fudgell's hometown of Bristol, England, conceived of an innovative and daring surgical procedure that might help her. He believed he could adjust Fudgell's skull and vertebrae to restore her face to a forward position, but it would require a feat never before attempted in modern medicine: to cut off the head from a living patient's body and then reattach it. Fudgell said she was terrified when Dr. Gill outlined his proposed treatment, but she decided she had no choice but to try it. "I was in so much pain," she said. "I was in so much agony, I just thought it couldn't get any worse, so I gave it a go." In the course of an operation lasting 17 hours, Gill detached Fudgell's head from her spinal column, leaving it connected to her body only by the spinal cord, major blood vessels and a small amount of skin tissue on the front of her neck. The surgeon was then able to excise a large wedge of fused bone formed by the base of her skull and the top vertebra. This allowed her head to fall back to a forward-facing position, which Gill secured by joining the bones with a metal plate and two screws. "It was a difficult thing to do in the area where critical blood vessels supply the brain and spinal cord," Gill said. "There comes a point where the head is loose relative to the neck and you have to start maneuvering the neck around, avoiding any pressure on any of these structures. That is quite a precarious time." Fortunately, the operation was a complete success. Fudgell was thankful for Gill's skill and his visionary procedure. "I have no regrets about going through with the operation and it is just a case of looking forward, literally," she said. An amputation and a decapitation, two victims of circumstance living worlds apart, a harrowing tale of insanity and an enlightened promise of hope... and believe it or not, it's possible to distill the quintessence of them both in one simultaneous moral: Sometimes we need a hand to keep from losing our heads. Sources: Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, Associated Press (Passmore story); Reuters, Electronic Telegraph (Fudgell story) (c) Copyright 1997 ParaScope, Inc. More Fortean Slips! Share your views in the Fortean Slips message board!