What Drives People to Want to Be Amputees?
`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.”‘
April 7th, 2006 at 10:46 am
This is absolutely fascinating!
I can’t imagine the mentality that would cause someone to do that – but somehow not knowing makes it even more interesting.
http://www.necromerica.blogspot.com
April 9th, 2006 at 7:44 pm
Yeah, I can’t imagine either. Having a part of your body that seems so foreign to you that you feel you need to remove it.
And it must have hurt for that guy to freeze his legs solid. Ouch.