ShareThisWhen Chris Pollock was trapped alone in a farm field two years ago, his hands caught in a grinding, mechanized corn picker, "I asked God three times to let me die."
Today, with new hands attached to his body, that despair is just a memory, and he looks forward to the next phase of his path-breaking life.
On Feb. 5, Pollock, a 41-year-old resident of Susquehanna Township near Harrisburg, became the third person to receive a hand transplant at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the second to get a double hand transplant and the first in the nation to have one of the limbs be attached above the elbow.
In his first interview since the operation, the former Pennsylvania National Guard mechanic was upbeat and at times seemed almost blase about his ordeal.
The day that changed his life -- Nov. 28, 2008 -- started with a visit to a friend's farm in Carlisle to help him harvest one more field of feed corn.
Around 5:15 p.m., he noticed the wagon was starting to overflow with corn. He left the tractor running, walked back to the ancient corn picker he was using, and tamped another corn stalk into the chute that fed the machine.
"The second time I bumped a stalk into the picker, my coat got caught and pulled my left hand in to the wrist, so I screamed, 'cause it really hurt."
After that shock and intense pain, "it was fight-or-flight to try to get my hand out and so I reached in with my right hand and the same thing happened and it ended up wrapping my coat up right up to about 4 inches below the elbow, and it tore the skin right off."
Thus began his agonizing half-hour trying to get someone to hear his cries for help. Eventually, neighbors showed up, and soon after that, a helicopter.
He was taken into surgery at Penn State Hershey Medical Center. Over the next week, he underwent three operations. His left hand was amputated above the wrist; his right arm was amputated below the elbow; and skin from his left thigh was used to cover the forearm.
A year later, Pollock had learned to use a prosthetic hook on his left arm and had resumed driving. When he found out he might be a candidate for a hand transplant, he jumped at the chance.
Once he passed physical and psychological screening tests, his lead surgeon, Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, "explained I'd be taking three steps back" on function if he went through a transplant, mainly because it takes months for the nerves in the recipient to grow into the donor's limbs.
For Pollock, it was a risk worth taking, "just to be able to pick things up without trying to guess how much pressure you're putting on it."
In hand and arm transplants, all the bones, tendons, muscles and blood vessels of the donor function, but the nerves are dead, and must wait for the recipient's nerves to grow into those channels.
That proceeds at about one inch per month, Lee said, and so it will be nine months to a year before Pollock will regain feeling and motor control of his left hand, and up to two years before he will be able to completely manipulate his right elbow, arm and hand.
When Pollock was evaluated for transplant, doctors told him the tissue at the end of his forearm was too damaged to make good connections to a donor limb, and so he agreed to let them amputate his arm above the elbow.
That actually made the surgery easier technically, Lee said, because it meant attaching the donor limb to fewer major muscles, nerves and blood vessels.
Pollock doesn't envision being a mechanic again, but he can see himself as an instructor. He bought his son a Ford Mustang last year and guided him through some repairs.
At the time of his accident, Pollock was separated from his wife and has since divorced. His children, 18-year-old twins, were angry at him for the breakup, he acknowledged, but his ordeal has drawn them closer.
He doesn't yet know when he'll be able to go home.
"I keep asking the doctors that but I don't get an answer -- it's like the Army," he said with a laugh.
(E-mail reporter Mark Roth at mroth(at)post-gazette.com. For more stories, visit www.scrippsnews.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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