“Don’t be a hairsplitter. We’re talking about potentially four thousand transplantable hands, right?”
“Hang on,” she said. “This is a really interesting database. All categories of organ-donation stats compiled by the federal government. You can sort by organ, by donor type, by state, all kinds of things. Okay, actually, there were about eight thousand deceased organ donors in the U.S. in 2008. So, in theory, sixteen thousand hands, if all of them had both hands when they died.”
“And how many hand transplants in the U.S. in 2008?”
“No hand-transplant stats in the federal database. Let me try ‘hand transplants United States 2008’ and see if my friend Google can shed any light.” A moment later she said, “I say again, wow.”
“How many?”
“Two.”
“Two thousand?”
“No,” she answered. “Two, period. As in ‘one, two, buckle my shoe.’”
“So the problem’s not a shortage of hands,” I mused, “but a shortage of hand-transplant experts? Not enough surgeons who’ve been trained to do it?”
She worked the keyboard again. “I believe you have sussed out the problem, Wise Master. Listen to this press release from Emory University Medical Center, dated February 2008: ‘The only physician in the United States formally trained in both hand surgery and transplant surgery is establishing a new program at Emory to train other experts and to conduct research on what is still an extraordinary procedure.’ One formally trained hand-transplant surgeon in the whole U.S. of A.—that would appear to be a bit of a bottleneck.” She turned to me and frowned. “I don’t get it,” she pondered out loud. “What makes a hand transplant a thousand times more complicated than a heart transplant? Hearts have lots of blood vessels and nerves, and the potential for the recipient’s body to reject the transplant would appear to be the same, whether it’s a heart or a hand, wouldn’t you think?”
I considered that for a moment. “I’m not sure that it’s the complexity that accounts for the difference,” I answered. “A heart transplant’s a lifesaving procedure—if you need a heart and you don’t get one, you die. But there are a lot of people walking around minus a hand or two. So maybe refining the techniques in hand-transplant surgery isn’t considered as high a priority.”
“Hmm,” she grunted, and did another search. “Guess how many boob jobs were done in 2008?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “Four hundred thousand. What doesthat say about priorities? Plenty of surgeons up to speed on that.”
“There’s a lot of money in plastic surgery,” I said. “It’s the free market at work.”
“Swell,” she retorted. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of perkiness.”
I sighed. “So the bottom line here, since it’s a left hand Eddie needs, is that the bionic hand, the i-Hand, looks like his best bet?”
“Looks like,” she agreed. “Be good to learn more about it, though—get a review from somebody other than the manufacturer’s own marketing department.”
“I think I know just the guy to ask,” I said.
THE GLEAMING WHITE PLANE TAXIINGtoward me was unlike any I’d ever seen. It had wings and a tail, true, as well as a pair of turboprop engines. But the engines were at the trailing edge of the wings and faced aft, so the propellers pushed the plane rather than pulling it. The fuselage wasn’t cylindrical but slightly bulbous, like the sleek body of a seal or a killer whale. The wings were set far back, near the tail; up near the plane’s nose was a much smaller pair of wings that angled slightly downward. As the plane turned its two-eyed, droop-winged nose directly toward the ramp, I realized that it bore a striking resemblance to a flying fish. A flying catfish, to be precise. The props stopped, the engines spooled down, and a door just behind the cockpit swung open. A small folding stair unfolded outward and down, and Glen Faust, M.D., Ph.D., descended from the aerial catfish and strode toward me, a leather satchel slung over one shoulder. “Dr. Brockton,” he called, “so nice of you to pick me up.”
“Welcome to Tennessee,” I said. “It was worth coming out here just to see that airplane. I’ve not seen one of those before.”
He smiled. “It’s a head turner, isn’t it? It’s an Italian design, which is why it looks so damn sexy. Nearly as fast as a jet—cruises at four hundred miles an hour—but a lot more efficient. Room for nine, and a high ceiling, thanks to that fat fuselage. Interesting thing is, the fuselage is actually an airfoil and provides part of the lift. That allows smaller wings—and therefore less drag. Clever, huh?”