Limbless Man Swims Across English Channel

Headline story can be found here & here. A remarkable feat for anyone to do. It's just plain incredible. This is his private website. For the animal lovers, here's an older animal amputee story that recently crossed my desk; a survival story from Hurricane Katrina. Also, you may recall Monica (Sprague) Jorge was on Oprah with Jenny McCarthy two years ago. Oprah had her back, this time with Nate Berkus, and surprised the Jorge family with a new house. They filmed a "Day in the life" video with Monica, before surprising her with the good news. Monica fell ill only weeks before Suzanne, and lost most of her arms and legs. Suzanne was fortunate to have kept her hands through her series of surgeries; and we credit the all of the medical professionals who treated her for months on end.

Speaking of Suzanne's hands, she will be heading back to the hand surgeon on Monday to have her cast removed from last week's surgery. Everything seems to be progressing well with that. But there are probably one or two more hand surgeries to go. Sue's legs are doing better as well. Her new prosthetist in Annapolis is working with her to mould new sockets for her legs. It is a trial and error adjustment phase which will take some time to get the best fit. Until then, the old legs are still holding her up, albeit rather uncomfortably.

Hand Surgery

Yesterday, Suzanne, had a follow-up surgery on her right wrist and hand. If you recall, back in January, she had an operation to increase mobility on her thumb(and index finger) as it had been seized preventing her from grasping anything with what was her dominant hand. The tissue transfer from her upper arm to her hand took well and it was finally time to clean it up. Dr. Higgins performed the operation again. He was able to remove some of scar tissue from the earliest operations in 2007. But the main purpose was to remove a lot of the bulk associated with the transferred tissue. It appears, for now, that she is done with hand operations for the foreseeable future. Being a “minor” surgery, relative to what she has already seen, she was able to return home after only a few hours in recovery. She is doing well.

Here is another remarkable amputee in the news:
Things are picking up for the bionic boy