Free The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel-5 by Jefferson Bass

i-Hand.”
    “The bionic prosthesis? Just for his left hand?” She nodded. “I thought he was more interested in a transplant.”
    “He was, but there’s a big problem with that, apparently.” She frowned. “It’s virtually impossible to be approved for a hand transplant unless you’re a double amputee.”
    “Eddieis a double amputee, essentially,” I pointed out. “He’s only got two fingers on his right hand.”
    “Apparently the hand surgeons consider those fingers more of a plus than you and I do,” she said. “He does have some function in them, after all. And once he gets the toe-to-thumb transplant—in a month or so, he hopes—he’ll have three digits on the right hand, including an opposable thumb.”
    “Still,” I protested, “it seems harsh to rule him out for a transplant on the left side. It’s like he’s being punished for being not quite maimed enough, you know? Like that sick girl—what did she have, lupus?—whose insurance company refused to pay for her medical treatment until she was dying.”
    “Well, yeah, sort of,” she hedged, “but on the other hand—ooh, remind me not to say that in front of Eddie—not everybody who wants a transplant can get one. If there aren’t enough hands to go around, what’s the best, fairest way to pick who gets one and who doesn’t? Ifyou were the one parceling out hands, how wouldyou pick?”
    I didn’t have an answer to that. But I did have another question. “Are there really not enough hands to go around?”
    She shrugged.
    “How many kidney transplants were performed in the United States last year?”
    She did a quick Google search. “Don’t know about last year,” she answered, “but over sixteen thousand were done in 2008.”
    “And how many hand transplants?”
    “Not a fair comparison,” she pointed out. “A lot of kidneys came from living donors—somebody’s son or sister or friend who was willing to give one up for a person they love.”
    “You’re right, not the same thing. How many heart transplants?”
    The keyboard rattled again. “Wow. Two thousand, one hundred sixty-three. I would have guessed a hundred or so.”
    “Okay. So none of those heart donors got out alive. If my math’s right, those twenty-one hundred heart donors had forty-two hundred hands, plus or minus.”
    “I don’t think you can say ‘plus’ unless some of them started out with three hands,” she said reasonably.
    “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