Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [59]
“Then in the 1970s,” Rudy said, “a few surgeons started using leeches after reconstructive surgery—especially in cases where they were doing reattachments. Some of these guys picked up the technique after serving in Vietnam and now they wanted a source for leeches back home.”
Rudy explained how his business partner, Marie Bonazinga, had met up with Jacques des Barax, the president of Ricarimpex, at an international conference on medicinal leeches in the early 1980s. Not long after, Leeches USA was formed and surgeons in the United States and Canada would have easy access to an ancient but valuable surgical assistant—one that required little if any training and could be delivered by overnight express, courier, or even helicopter. Currently, Ricarimpex sells around seventy thousand leeches a year.*83
Rudy recounted a number of cases—some of them rather high profile—in which leeches from his company played an important role in surgical reattachments. One such case involved a young female musician who was pushed off a New York City subway platform and had one of her hands severed by a passing train. The woman’s hand was successfully reattached, and although she could no longer pursue a career as an instrumentalist she went on to become a successful occupational therapist.
Another was the case of John Wayne Bobbitt, who gained an unwanted degree of fame when his wife, Lorena, briefly took the penal code into her own hands. Driving off with a tip from her husband, Mrs. Bobbitt eventually tossed the evidence out of her car window. Remarkably, the misplaced member was recovered by a sharp-eyed policeman and Rudy’s company was called upon to supply the leeches necessary for what was to become a combination reattachment/enlargement surgery.
In addition to their importance in reattaching structures like fingers and ears, a hundred or more leeches might be used over the course of several weeks in cases where the scalp has been accidentally torn from a person’s skull. Typically, though rarely, this occurs when the victim’s hair is pulled into a piece of heavy machinery.
Leeches are also commonly employed in breast reconstruction, although in 1993, a leech went missing after such a surgery. Concerned physicians eventually determined that the wayward creature had entered the sutured wound. The wandering worm was later recovered from inside the patient’s breast.
Leech therapy is also used in transfer operations, when skin or muscle is grafted from one place on the body to another. Two Slovenian surgeons, who reported their results in the British Journal of Plastic Surgery in 1960, undertook the first of these leech-assisted transfers. Some thirteen years later, the procedure would save my father’s leg.
In July 1973 my father was involved in a terrible boating accident while we were on vacation in upstate New York. The propeller of our ski boat motor tore apart his knee, leaving a horrible wound and little for surgeons to use to reconstruct the joint.
To replace the missing flesh surrounding his knee, a multistep procedure started when a flap of tissue from my dad’s abdomen was partially removed, then stitched into a tubelike structure. After a week or so, one end of the tube was detached from his body and reattached near his wrist (the other end of the tube was still attached about eight inches to the side of Dad’s belly button). Once the circulation was reestablished, the belly end of the tube was removed and reattached to the area just below his elbow—so that it now resembled a handle spanning his forearm.
In this type of surgery—where a flap of skin is “walked” to a new destination—leeches are commonly used if circulation in the transferred skin begins to fail (i.e., if the color of the transferred skin changes from pink to purple).
“Check it out, Billy,” I remember my dad saying. “They’re turning me into a set