Mark Holmgren from Edmonton, Canada was only 17 when he borrowed a friend’s motorbike and got involved in an accident.
“I was just driving too fast, turned the corner and I wiped out,” he said to CTV.
“I tore the nerves in my shoulder. It was a brachial plexus injury and from that day I could never use it. Couldn’t move it, couldn’t feel it.”
For almost two decades, Holmgren walked around with his non-working arm before he decided to amputate it.
After contacting medics at the University of Alberta Hospital, he also decided to get the arm preserved.
“At first it was: ‘I’m going to wait, they’ll be able to fix it, they’re coming up with new stuff, give me a robotic arm’, stuff like that – and I’ve been waiting too long,” Holmgren said.
“I just decided to remove it. Move on, I guess.”
A month after the procedure, the lab contacted him to inform him that his arm was ready for pick up.
Holmgren ‘carried it out of the hospital in a garbage bag’ before putting it in a freezer for more than a month.
He then looked for a taxidermist who would be willing to clean and preserve his arm. “A couple of them told me no, like right away,” he shared. “There was no way they were going to touch human body parts.”
Luckily for him, staff at Legends Taxidermy in Drayton Valley said they would do it for him. The process involved stripping the bones with the help of hundreds of insects chewing the flesh for many weeks.
“Our client Mark was in a severe motor cycle accident over 15 years ago and lost use of his arm,” Legends Taxidermy wrote on Instagram.
“Finally this past year he was able to get it amputated and asked if we would clean it up for him. Its the oddest project we have ever had but one of the most fulfilling seeing it all come together.”
Holmgren, who was reunited with his arm before Christmas, said: “Some of them wanted to touch it, some of them don’t want to touch it. It’s just mixed feelings when people see it.”
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Replaced!