What Drives People to Want to Be Amputees?

ABC News ^ | 4/5/06 | Staff

[Millee]

Karl is a double amputee, but not by accident, birth or disease. He is an amputee by choice.

Six years ago, Karl (who asked that his real name not be used) sat alone in a parked car with 100 pounds of dry ice and an obsession to destroy his legs.

"The first thing I did was I used a wooden flour scoop to scoop some granulated dry ice into the bucket. … It filled the wastebasket with carbon dioxide gas, which was 79 degrees below zero," he said.

Over the next 45 minutes, Karl put his legs in the wastebasket and then kept adding dry ice until it got to the top. "I spent the next six hours well-packed in the dry ice, and then I'd add more dry ice to keep it topped off," he said. A chemistry major in college, Karl had done his research well.

"I'd done all the thermodynamic calculations, the mass of tissue, how much heat you had to subtract from that tissue to achieve freezing temperatures," he said. "And I knew that after six hours I had certainly achieved more than enough to freeze the full thickness."

After those six hours, Karl calmly drove himself to an emergency room, using the automatic hand controls he had installed in the car.

Within days, his legs began to blacken as the frozen tissue died away, and within a month surgeons had no choice but to amputate both of Karl's legs.

Karl is not a one-of-a-kind medical mystery, however. There are others like him, who believe their bodies don't match the picture of themselves they have in their minds.

[Millee]

Bizarre. I've never heard of anything like this.

[Toby06]

WOW!

There are some really sick & twisted people in this world! Thank God i only know a few hundred of them.

[thoughtomator]

There was some guy who called 911 after he took his own foot off with a circular saw... the remaining foot. The other foot he had taken off years earlier.

[jdm]

A lot of times I wish I didn't have a body either -- it just falls apart and gets sick anyway.

[Millee]

Present company excluded right??? Right?????

[najida]

Self multilation.

I'm feeling dizzy.

[freedomson]

This makes tattoos and piercing look so passe.

[Toby06]

Doll, you don't even come close!

[H. Paul Pressler IV]

Anyone can cut off their legs.

Be a Man, Cut off Your Head!

[baker_girl]

Weird!

[Millee]

Aaawwww!

[Toby06]

You don't wear a hockey helmet on the short, window-licker bus, right?

[teenyelliott]

"What the hell was I thinking?"

Pretty much sums up the whole story.

[Millee]

Honey(!), helmets muss the hair!

Besides, I don't know what a window-licker bus is. Sounds icky.

[BunnySlippers]

I read an article about this kind of thing some years ago. Bizarre in the extreme. I can't imagine wanting to be handicapped.

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

Why drives people to want to be amputees?

How about insanity?

[M1Tanker]

And I bet this person will apply for every tax-payer supported benefit he can too. And then we will be told we can't understand him, or "feel his pain". And then we will be called racists and "evil" (which coming from moral relativists is really strange) by those who say the rest of working America should pay his medical bills for the rest of his life.

I wonder how many critically injured people had to wait for treatment because of his acts? How many resources did that hospital have to expend for this self-mutilation?

It's just sick and wrong what this person did to himself and the 2nd and 3rd order effects in that hospital and ER.

But the media just eats it up.

[Toby06]

OK, you are cool.

[headsonpikes]

This is nothing compared to the voluntary lobotomies eagerly sought by so many liberal Dems!