"I'll watch it die!" (freak accident severed doctor's hand, but successful reimplantation saved his career)

Life can't get any better than this, I thought as I walked beside my father. After medical school and the rigors of internship, my life-long ambition to be a doctor had been realized. I relished the challenge of trauma care medicine in a busy emergency room. But medicine was more than a career--it was a chance to make a difference in the lives of people I treated.

"I wish you'd wait till both lanes clear," my father signed when I ignored the warning, stepped off the curb, and walked briskly across two lanes before stopping at the double yellow line to wait for a break in the traffic. I wrapped the nylon leash snugly around my hand several times in order to control the prancing young Doberman at my side.

It was 8:30, and twilight descended rapidly over Santa Barbara on that September evening. Most vehicles had their lights on. But a driver approaching from my left in a convertible was too busy impressing his girlfriend to notice either his speed or the diminishing visibility.

Then it happened. The left front bumper of the car going 45 miles per hour hit my dog, sending him hurtling through the air. My father saw me lying facedown, stretched out across the yellow lines.

"Myron! Myron!" he shouted as he knelt beside me.

Dazed but conscious, I slowly pulled my right hand toward my face. The nylon dog leash hadn't broken on impact. Instead, it had tightened, stretched thin and sharp as a razor, brutally tearing through flesh and bones. From the web of my thumb and index finger directly across my palm, my hand hung by a couple of tendons and strips of muscle, with my flesh pulled back over my injured fingers like a glove that had been peeled off.

My father scooped me up off the pavement and carried me like a baby back to the curb.

A clinical part of my mind recognized symptoms of shock. "I'll never be a surgeon now," I muttered dully as I stared at the mangled hand.

"I'll watch it die!" An ambulance rushed me to the Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital. After cleaning and X-raying the hand, a colleague gave the verdict: "The only thing we can do is get you a good orthopedic man to amputate the hand."

But I thought of one other possibility: my old professor at the Loma Linda University Medical School, Dr. Virchel Wood, a specialist in hand surgery.

Within 90 minutes an air ambulance flew me 180 miles to Loma Linda, California. Dr. Wood met me in the emergency room. After a thorough examination, however, his verdict was equally grim.

"It would have been better if your hand had been severed neatly," Dr. Wood said to his former student. "As it is, the tissues, blood vessels, and nerves have been so badly stretched and frayed--I just don't think we can reattach the hand."

"Sew it back on, and I'll watch it die!" I muttered in despair.

Dr. Wood hesitated as he considered my condition. The technology and surgical protocols for reimplanting a severed limb weren't well developed in 1975.

"I can't promise you anything in advance, but we might try it," he mused thoughtfully. "We purchased a surgical microscope recently, and another faculty member, Dr. Gary Fryman, just finished a fellowship in hand surgery. Let me see if I can get him to take a look."

My father prayed as they wheeled me away: "Lord, You have blessed my son with gifts as a talented doctor. Please save his hand."

Surgery began at midnight and lasted for nine hours. Four of those hours were spent tediously peering through a microscope as the surgeons struggled to reattach tendons, tiny blood vessels, bones, and tissues.

Now we wait. "Now we wait," Dr. Wood said as he removed the last clamps at 9:00 Sunday morning. But nothing happened. Then slowly, gradually, the lifeless-looking hand began to turn pink as blood rushed through the veins.

"That's all we can do for now," Dr. Wood sighed wearily. "The rest we'll have to leave up to the Lord."

I regained consciousness later that morning in the intensive care unit. Through bleary eyes I slowly focused on my hand, hanging from a pole. It was grotesquely swollen and discolored, and the bruised fingers continued to swell until they looked like four fat sausages sticking out from the palm.

I noticed my father standing nearby, his head bowed in prayer. I was thankful for my pastor-father, but I honestly wasn't sure what I believed about God's healing grace. Keep praying, Pop, I thought as I drifted into sleep.

A battle between will and pain. "Now the work begins," Dr. Wood told me a week later. "You've got to exercise that hand and move the fingers once an hour if you ever want to use it again--starting today."

After the doctors and my family left the room, I gripped my right hand as tight as I could, squeezing the blood out until it nearly turned white. All the tendons and connective tissue were scarring down at the point of injury. The slightest movement brought on the most excruciating pain I'd ever experienced.

With cold sweat dripping off my forehead, I clinched my teeth and manually moved each finger just a fraction of an inch before falling back across the bed exhausted.

I kept at it--hour after hour, day after day, stubbornly refusing to surrender to either pain or paralysis.

Nearly two months passed before the swelling subsided. At the end of five months I could move my fingers, pick up small objects, and write again. But part of the hand was still numb.

I knew I needed more hand function than that if I were to do surgery again.

God answers prayer. It was a routine evening in the emergency room--until Kyle and Linda Baxter (pseudonyms) burst through the doors, carrying their 2 1/2-year-old daughter in their arms.

The baby struggled frantically, gasping forair. What had initially seemed like a bad cold had suddenly turned lethal on this April night. Even from a distance I could see the waxy pallor in her face--an indication of impending shock.

She suffered from epiglottis, a bacterial infection that causes swelling in the flap valves that cover the windpipe when she swallowed. I knew I had only a couple minutes to do what needed to be done.

I slipped on surgical gloves while the shaken parents huddled in the waiting room, praying that God would guide my hand and save their little girl.

Pressing the blade steadily against her throat just below the Adam's apple, I made a small incision to open an airway.

The emergency was over as quickly as it began. Once an airway was open, the child's breathing quickly returned to normal. Although still unconscious from the strain on her little body, treatment with antibiotics would have her up and active again within days.

Tears of joy and relief streamed down her mother's face when I told her the news. She didn't notice the wince as she squeezed my hand, nor did she see the clearly defined scar running across the back of my hand.

It was the first surgical procedure I had done since my hand had been torn off seven months before.

"I prayed that God would guide your hand," the father said.

I smiled and flexed the fingers on my fully functioning hand. "I know from personal experience that there's real power in prayer," I said.

Jeris Bragan writes from Nashville, Tennessee. Dr. Myron Mills works in the trauma center at Vanderbilt University Hospital.