Surgeon-to-Be Had Hands Severed as a Boy

Oct. 8 -- As he scrubs up for surgery, Dr. Woosik Chung looks like any harried first-year medical resident. But for Chung, the road to the operating room was nothing short of miraculous.

His journey to becoming an American orthopedic surgeon began in South Korea with a terrible tragedy. It is a miracle that Chung can wash his hands, let alone perform intricate surgery.

"Most people who go into orthopedics had an injury," said Dr. Howard Kiernan of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center's orthopedics clinic in New York. "Their interest was stimulated by their parents being in medicine, or they had an injury."

In Chung's case, it was both. When Chung was 3 years old, he was playing with friends in Uijongbu, South Korea, when he touched the whirling fan of a tractor engine, completely severing both his hands. His father, a South Korean army surgeon, witnessed his son's horrible accident. He and his mother, a nurse, retrieved the boy's hands and put them on ice.

A Rare, Risky Operation

Unable to find a specialist because it was a national holiday, John Chung reattached his child's hands with his own hands, during a risky and rare nine-hour surgery that he had never performed. This May, a quarter of a century later, the success of that surgery is clear.

John Chung watched his son graduate from the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark, N.J. The 28-year-old is now a first-year orthopedic resident at Columbia-Presbyterian, and he is by all accounts an incredibly talented surgeon.

"He has a very bright future, there's no doubt about that," Kiernan said.

The scars on Woosik Chung's hands are barely visible anymore.

"The scars have really faded," Woosik Chung said. "But when I was a kid they were pretty bad. I was teased and called Frankenstein, and other things. I got into a lot of fights. But I was always happy, just happy to have my hands."

Unusual Physical Therapy

Chung believes that a combination of his dad's great skill, his own youth, and plain old luck made the surgery a success, he said.