I was surfing StumbleUpon the other night and found one of the most disturbing cases of body modification I've ever seen.

After years of tattoos, piercings, and implants identical twins Ryan and Dave decided to take body modification to an all new level. After researching private practitioners and nurses the twins found willing parties to perform an amputation of Dave's right arm (both are left handed) and then a surgical reattachment of the arm behind Ryan's right pectoral muscle. They also modified their ring fingers on both left hands.

I've included the photos and full article as well as a link to the site I found the info on. What do you think of extreme body modification? Would you ever have elective surgery of this kind?

http://www.bmezine.com/news/people/A10101/addsub/

Ryan and Dave are the most unique identical twins you'll ever meet. After tiring of piercing, tattoos, and implants about three years ago, they began exploring much heavier surgical modifications. Dave had spent two and a half years in pre-med at Queens University in Kingston, and using contacts made both there and online he and his twin brother have changed themselves in ways far beyond anything anyone else has ever attempted.

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BME: Let's quickly talk about how this all got started.

RYAN: I guess when we were about thirteen we started getting tattooed. This is when we were living in Phoenix. I won't deny that we had pretty poor judgement and got some pretty bad tattoos. Luckily, they were fairly light and over time we got some real nice coverups, as you can see.

DAVE: Our lives in Phoenix were actually pretty rough and our parents knew that we were running with the wrong crowd, so when we were sixteen they sent us to live with our aunt in Toronto -- Canada -- it was a bit of a culture shock but turned out for the best. I finished high school at the top of my class and was offered a biology scholarship at Queens University which soon transitioned into Pre-Med. Ryan stayed in Toronto and got hooked up with the piercing scene.

RYAN: Some friends of mine were just setting up a new studio -- Dave and I had been doing piercings on our friends for about a year, and it just seemed like the right thing at the right time so I decided to become a piercer. At this point the piercing community was pretty young and it was an "anything goes" scene and still mostly underground -- I got to meet a lot of guys into amputation and castration and really heavy stuff. It got me thinking a lot about what we wanted to do with our own bodies. I introduced Dave to them as well and he shared my feelings.

BME: What happened next?

Ryan "holding on to" Dave's arm.

RYAN: After discussing and thinking about it very seriously for about a year, we decided to take the big step. To put it simply, Dave had his entire right arm (since we're left handed) amputated at the shoulder and we surgically reattached it immediately behind my right pectoral muscle.

BME: Wow. If I wasn't looking at it right now I'd never believe it. How was the procedure done?

DAVE: Obviously there was no clinic willing to do a procedure like this (we didn't even bother to ask), so we had to do it all under local anaesthesia since we simply didn't have the facilities to safely administer general anaesthesia. We had a group of two practitioners and two assistants working on us. First we elevated my arm and using an Ace bandage we slowly squeezed all of the blood out of it. Then we tourniquetted as high up on the shoulder it could be, and injected lidocaine into the exsanguinated veins. Almost immediately there was no feeling whatsoever. An amputation knife cut through the skin and muscles, and a bone saw did the final removal. Bleeders were ligated and the wound was cleaned up. This entire part of the procedure took about forty minutes.

RYAN: At the same time as Dave was being worked on, the other practitioner and his assistant prepared the attachment site on my chest. Veins and arteries were spliced to supply blood to Dave's arm and the skin and some of the subcutaneous tissue was peeled up to merge as smoothly as possible. Luckily the healing went smoothly. The transplant healed up in about a month, as did Dave's stump.

BME: You're a bit vague as to who did it. Who were the "practitioners" and how did you find them?

DAVE: When we had the procedure done we signed non-disclosure agreements and legally swore to protect the identities of everyone involved. As far as how we met them, you'd be amazed how many kooks you meet in med school. That's as far as I'm willing to go on that question; I'm sure your readers will understand. This type of procedure is simply not acceptable.

BME: Did you have any difficulties with rejection?

RYAN: That's the nice thing about being identical twins! We share the same genetics!

BME: You can't be that identical -- You're wearing glasses and Dave isn't.

RYAN: Dave wears contacts; he's vain. Anyway, because our genetics are the same, healing a transplant is no more difficult that healing a severe laceration. I'm exaggerating a little, but it's not the same as a regular transplant.

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Dave

Ryan

BME: The arm is amazing, but I've got to admit that this "alien finger" thing you've done is really something. It's unlike anything I've ever seen before. It's actually quite disconcerting!

RYAN: Yeah, we're very proud of it. When people see the arm, they think it was an accident -- transplants like this do get done every once in a while for medical reasons. The finger though, that's art. We challenge anyone to take body art to a higher level.

BME: How did you pull this one off?

DAVE: First we removed the centre joint of my finger, along with the skin and just over an inch of overhanging tendon. Then we split Ryan's finger at the end of the first joint. It was relatively easy to insert the extra joint, especially since we had so much extra tendon to play with. The amazing thing is that Ryan actually has feeling in the end of that finger now -- the nerves were compatible!

BME: Dave, why are you wearing a bandaid over your stubby finger?

DAVE: When we put my finger tip back on, minus the middle joint, we didn't have enough tendon to work with so I don't actually have very much mobility in it. I tend to bang it a lot. We're actually going to remove it altogether and remove the bone right down to the wrist. That will let us shift the little finger over without much apparent scarring giving us a very realistic three fingered hand.

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BME: Can I ask what the two of you do for a living? I assume you don't have regular jobs.

DAVE: We make a great living in the traditional world. I'm not going to say the name of our company, but to suffice it to say that we're the sixth largest producer of adult entertainment software in North America. The Ferrari Dino 246 that Ryan is leaning on right now is a $50,000 car. That may not seem like a lot of money, but we paid it off in one day. Not all "freaks" are punk kids.

BME: I know you don't really like talking about this that much, but... why?

RYAN: First and foremost, we consider ourselves artists. A lot of our friends and associates who have similar interests have a more fetish oriented body modification attitude about it -- while we respect that point of view, it's not what we're about.

BME: Any regrets?

DAVE: I guess I'm the one that should answer that one. No. Not at all. We share everything. I don't feel that I've given anything up. I'm not sure if anyone who's not an identical twin can really understand the strange bond that's going on here. I've never had a phantom limb pain. It really feels like it's all still a part of me.

BME: What modifications does the future hold for you two?

DAVE: We've got some genital work planned that's pretty exciting. As soon as it happens we'll be sure to update BME readers with some photos.

I stumbled on this photo while surfing the net today and it really got me thinking about all the unnecessary controversy surrounding the issue of abortion. It seems the issue isn't really with abortion itself but with peoples individual views of morality. If the issue was with the medical procedure then the arguments wouldn't be that God says its wrong or that its murder.

Why is it that issues like these that should be a persons private choice are pushed to the forefront of Presidential elections to be debated on? Why do we as Americans focus on such trivial things that in all fairness shouldn't even be considered when it comes to elections? Especially when the focus is put on religious reasoning and personal beliefs. I agree that a potential Presidential candidate's character and beliefs play a role in deciding whether they could be a suitable leader because who wants a child molester or murderer running the country, but I believe the stance that a candidate has on more important issues (i.e. Education, the suffering economy, our continuing occupation of Iraq, our increasing national deficit, and rising crime rate) far outweigh whether s/he is a 'good Christian' or comparable to a saint.

A potential Presidential electee should be chosen based on what s/he can do to better our country in ways that benefit all American citizens. And in no way should a candidate be exempt from upholding our Constitutional rights or be allowed to violate them. It saddens me that instead of being Americans and staying true to what our forefathers fought to give us, we want to turn our backs on certain freedoms because we don't agree with something. The things that seperate America from other countries is our acceptance of differences in other people. Our willingness to open our doors to the needy and underpriveligded and create a life better than what some otherwise might have lived. When we ignore the foundation that America was built on we take away the very thing that makes us so great. We are the land of the free, but not if our political leaders are allowed to walk all over the rights our brave soldiers, past and present, have fought and died to instill and protect for our country.

America the Great, right now its more like, America the Fake.