A man deliberately chopped off his left hand using a homemade guillotine before tossing it into a blazing bin to ensure surgeons couldn’t sew it back on.
Mark Goddard, who has been in constant pain since a motorbike accident in 1998 left him with damaged nerves in his left arm, carried out the bizarre surgery in his own back garden in Newton Abbot, Devon after surgeons refused to amputate the injured limb.
Goddard removed the hand with a homemade guillotine
According to Goddard, who takes up to 40 painkillers a day, National Health Service doctors had ignored his pleas to end the pain, leaving the 44-year-old father desperate. As such, he spent two weeks constructing the guillotine in his yard, carrying out his procedure only when his wife and son were out of the house.
Despite losing two pints of blood, paramedics were able to stabilise Goddard, who had been called by his horrified wife after she had returned from washing the car. Fortunately for Goddard, the severed hand was too badly burned to be saved.
"I should not have to go to such extremes to get my pain stopped," he told SWNS. "There was an alternative and that was having it done properly in hospital. But no one would do anything to help me - so I did it myself. There should never have been any need for me to do this. It would have spared so much distress all round - but it was the only way.
Mark spent two weeks constructing the guillotine in his back garden
"I got rid of it because they told me they had problems amputating my arm with a good hand on it. So I took it off myself and now there is no reason why they can't operate."
Despite the brutality of the homemade operation, Goddard is now threatening to chop off more body parts unless surgeons remove the arm above the elbow before the end of 2014.