A history of transplants

This is not a normal family medical history. Not by any standards.

I of course have already had one transplant (thanks sis) and am hoping to have another fairly soon but I am far from the first person to be on the receiving end of one in this family and I'm quite some distance short of the strangest.

We'll bypass the frankly amateur efforts of my father and some of his siblings who each required grafts of veins from their legs to fix their failing hearts - that's not a real transplant anyway.

No, lets go instead to the maternal grandfather shall we?

His is the sort of tale that hopefully is very much of its time. He was a Polish man who was going to study in a seminary to become a priest. It was his misfortune to be taken by the Russians (who weren't big fans of religion) to one of their Gulags
where he was imprisoned until it was attacked by Germans and he made his escape.

As escapes go it wasn't tremendously successful as he was now in woods with nothing to eat and was freezing. Before long he was taken by the Germans. At first, due to his ability to speak German and his mild accent, he was taken as being a captured German and so was treated in the camp infirmary until he got better.

Eventually he did improve and by this point the Germans had realised that he was in fact not one of their own but in the short time they had looked after him well they noticed he had a terrible stomach condition that would likely kill him. At this point they took it upon themselves to perform surgery on him where they would replace his stomach with that of a pig. It's long since been proven that pig tissue can be used for grafts on humans due to the tissue type being so similar but this was almost certainly either the very first or one of the first examples of it ever being applied. The surgery was successful and even though there weren't anti-rejection drugs or any such thing available he survived for forty years after it was performed.

He made his second escape from this camp when he was well enough and the Allies had attacked the camp and the Germans had fleed. This time he managed to stay out on his own and travelled down as far as France where he lived with a family until the war ended and he was given the choice of repatriation or to go and live in Scotland or Canada.

He chose Scotland and soon met up with my Grandmother. They were married and had their only child, my mother, in 1950.

I remember only a little of him as I was only 4 years old when he died but what I remember more than anything was how gentle a man he was. It seems to be a common character trait of those who survived those places. He clearly saw some incredible things in his life and while part of me would love to hear more of his life story I know I would never have asked him. I know this story only from my Gran telling me it before she died.

She says he was adamant that even though the methods that had been used were deeply sinister, it was the German doctors who saved his life. He thought no ill of them even though what they had done to him was well beyond the pale in terms of medical ethics.

It's always been something that has left my brain doing somersaults as well. My very existence is down to a bunch of Nazis who took it upon themselves to perform radical surgery on a prisoner of war.

I know that in a lot of the camps where such testing was commonplace many of the doctors took to burning the evidence of their experiments for fear of being charged with war crimes. I wonder how many other things the Nazis found out through their hideous experiments that was lost in this way and wonder if any good could have come from all that evil. It's a deeply unpalatable concept to try and address so it's one I try not to spend too much time on.

It's mostly when I can't sleep at night, which is exactly what's happening now.

And now, to bed.

P