"We can rebuild him" ... Or... can we?
When I see a patient with a horrible injury, as I did last week, I'm always reminded of the hit 70s TV show The Six Million Dollar Man, starring Lee Majors. I know of it peripherally, but never watched very much - it was cancelled almost a decade before I was born (editorial note: remind me to talk about older generations blaming younger generations for not knowing about the culture that preceded theirs). (Bonus editorial rant: $6M is a pittance compared to what it would REALLY cost today to rebuild a human to that degree. Even partially. $6M might cover part of the surgery and/or maybe part of the ICU stay. But you'd need to tack on a whole lot more to that tab, such as the nursing, the drugs, the anesthesiologist, the post-operative therapy... and who would pay for the dozens of administrators necessary to ensure quality, safety, reliability, and 17 other things that end in "-ty"?) Invariably, someone will jokingly refer to the most famous line from that show...