Surgeon-to-Be Had Hands Severed as a Boy

Oct. 8, 2003 -- 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.

"I remember him sewing my hands back on," Chung said. "I saw a concentrated look on his face. He was very focused and he did a very detailed job."

After the surgery, his grandfather, a tae kwon do master, gave young Chung martial arts instruction, and those lessons served as the only physical therapy he received. Two years after the surgery, he regained full use of his hands.

"I think physically using my hands daily helped me get flexibility and movement back in my hands," Chung said. "The thing with rehabilitation is that if you don't use the hand, you lose strength and sensation. And my grandfather kept pushing me to use my hands. We would take hikes up mountains and just practice."

At 14, he and his family moved to the United States, and after attending school in New Jersey, he went on to Yale University, where he was a tae kwon do martial arts champion.

Movement and Technique Worked Magic

His mentors say that he has the skills of an advanced surgeon. Chung says tae kwon do helped him immensely.

"There is a lot of movement and technique with movement of your hands in the sport and I've translated that into surgery," Chung said. "And I have always enjoyed using my hands to put things together. My parents told me as a kid I bought out the store, buying models and putting them together."

Now, he still does tae kwon do and works as an instructor, but he has cut down on the sparring, the full contact portion of the sport.

Now, he's using those miracle hands to help others. He has performed surgery for people with fractures, but has not yet performed reattachment surgery. He looks forward to the opportunity to work on more complicated surgery though, and will specialize in hand surgery.

"I hope it will feel like I am fulfilling a duty that I owe not just to my dad, but to my situation," he said. "I received a gift and I want to repay that gift."