BY ALBERTO CALDERON SUN STAFF ON CAMPUS
Navigating his way through the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio, host to the biggest medical convention in America, Moises Aramburo, 23, is met with quizzical looks and a bevy of questions from strangers as they curiously inspect his robot assisted hand.
Aramburo said he has become accustomed to the attention since his accident three years ago, which resulted in the amputation of four fingers and on his right hand. Today the attention is more focused on his cutting-edge prosthetic.
“People don’t know what to make of it,” he said. “They either think it’s a gaming device or some wrist brace. Dogs and children have the funniest reactions. Some dogs just bark at it while kids are either curious or run away to their parents.”
Aramburo is one of the first people in the world to be fitted with such a device. He was brought to the convention as a brand ambassador for Touch Bionics, the manufacturer of the new technology. In San Antonio he had media engagements that he handled with aplomb, retelling his story and modeling the new “Quantum Digits,” a testament to a life that refuses to be defined by tragedy. Since being brought on by the company three months ago he has been interviewed more than a dozen times, most recently by the Huffington Post on a segment about the intersection of robotics and everyday human life.
Aramburo said the most common question he fields is “How did it happen?”
“The news always takes the Good Samaritan approach,” he said, “which is kind of right, but I didn’t lose my hand doing a good deed, so I don’t like how they do that, but news is news.”
Aramburo said he was on summer break from college in 2012 in his native Cabo San Lucas, Mexico and a tropical storm had left the streets flooded. He and his brother Aaron went out to drive around in a friend’s brand new truck. After helping stranded drivers by towing them to safety, Aramburo said he had the idea to try to use the tow rope and a boogie board to surf on the vacant streets. He wrapped the rope around his knuckles and his friend began to slowly pull away in the truck. Aramburo said things quickly went wrong.
“It wasn’t even 10-15 seconds when I heard a snap and my hand was burning,” he said. “I put my hand up to my face, I just saw four bones sticking up and just blood and tendons, like a peeled banana. I looked down and (my fingers) were just laying on my boogie board. I grabbed them and put them back on, I didn’t know what to do with them. It never crossed my mind that that could happen. You know, you see your fingers farther than you’ve ever seen them, and you think of moving them and they don’t move. It’s not something you’ve been trained to react to.”
Aaron said he saw everything through the back of the truck.
“I heard him yell and then saw him start running toward the hospital,” he said. “It was horrible. It was midnight and I had to go wake up my mom and tell her what had happened. I don’t like remembering anything about it, just the fact that when I talk about it I can remember that one decision that could have changed everything.”
With his four severed fingers in his possession, Aramburo said he ran into the hospital in search of a surgeon to reattach them. After going to multiple hospitals he was informed that there was no surgeon anywhere in the region able to perform the necessary surgery with any likelihood of success. He said his hope began to dwindle.
“I was sitting in the back of the ambulance just beating myself up,” he said. “I just kept thinking, ‘Look at what you did. You just changed your whole life over a stupid accident.’ It was extremely time sensitive, because I knew that once you lose a limb you only have so much time to reattach it. I turned to my mom and said ‘I don’t know what we are going to do, but I have my fingers and I need someone to reattach them.’”
Aramburo said it was at this point that his family history played an important role.
“My family is one of the first settlers of Cabo,” he said. “We were the first ones to drive a motorcycle in Cabo, stuff like that, a lot of firsts. We have a lot of roots there, so we asked around to a lot of prominent families in the area if they had a friend with a private jet, since it was a medical emergency. A family came through.”
After landing at Brown Field, Aramburo said his goal was within sight.
“We drove to UCSD Hillcrest and I walk into the emergency room with my fingers in a Styrofoam cooler,” he said. “I bang on the glass and sit down with my cooler down next to me and you can hear the ice sloshing and my fingers are in two Ziploc bags. I put my arm over it so no one steals my cooler. The nurse comes over and says ‘Oh, what’s the issue?’ I said ‘my fingers are in the cooler, I need someone to reattach them’ and she stares at the cooler not understanding.”
After an 18-hour surgery, the doctors were able to reattach all of Aramburo’s fingers. In the tests following the surgery, his pinky finger was found to be unresponsive. Aramburo took the setback in stride.
“I was like four out of five is not that bad,” he said. “I was just so happy. For me, given what I had been through, that was a good ratio.”
His pinky finger’s unresponsiveness, however, was a harbinger of things to come.
“Five days later I wake up, it was five in the morning there are a bunch of people,” he said. “They asked me to move my fingers and I couldn’t. The surgeon started crying and he said ‘I am really sorry but our surgery didn’t work.’ All my fingers turned black and they would not respond. They just died. When they told me it failed, I gave up. That was the worst because I did not know I could lose them at that point. I didn’t know there was a failure rate. Why would I not feel them in a week if I felt them and moved them (earlier)?”
In the ensuing months Aramburo underwent seven surgeries. The wound on his hand was so large it was unable to scar over, forcing the surgeons to graft skin from different parts of his body to cover it. He was in the hospital for two months.
Aaron Aramburo said his brother’s prospects looked dire.
“I remember going through my day trying not to use my right hand to see how he would have to live each day,” he said. “I knew it would be really hard for him and I knew he had to be super strong. I didn’t know what the outcome was going to be.”
Moises’s sister, Rebekah Aramburo, said her brother is one of the few people she knows that could overcome such a difficult situation.
“When I think about what I would have done in his situation,” she said, “I don’t think I would have been as strong. He was really down for a while, but we knew he would be OK. He is one of the strongest people I know. I really admire Moises. He just needed something to give him hope.”
Arumburo’s silver lining came from an unexpected source. His ex-girlfriend’s father came to visit him in the hospital and brought a Touch Bionics pamphlet with all of the company’s prosthetic options. Aramburo said he immediately knew he had to have one. After receiving an outpouring of support from his family and friends, he had funds to purchase one.
Aramburo said the help he received was the most surprising part of his saga.
“I thought people wouldn’t want to help me for doing something so reckless,” he said, “It has been extremely humbling and I can’t express how grateful I am for everyone’s love and support.”
Once he was outfitted with his new prosthetic he resolved to take more control of his destiny.
“When I got this one, I was worried about how long I would be able to use this,” he said. “Like is this going to work forever? I wanted to prepare for something going wrong with it. Now that I have one, I didn’t want to think about going without one again. I began to show pictures of me showing it off on Instagram, hash tag ‘touchbionics.’ I kind of started my own media campaign. I wanted to be the amputee that showed off his prosthetic the most, maybe even get on their radar.”
His efforts paid off. He received a call from the company and was asked to meet with some prospective customers who were interested in seeing the prosthetic up close. A couple weeks later they offered him a position as a brand ambassador and flew him to the company headquarters in Scotland where he was outfitted with the new “Quantum Fingers” hand model.
Aramburo said he is happy he has the chance to give back.
“I still remember the first time I went on the Touch Bionics website,” he said. “I saw someone showing off the hand and it gave me hope. To think I might be that person for someone else now is mind blowing. It wasn’t even a thought in my mind to be the most popular user, which I’m not. There’s this one model, Rebekah Marine, who takes part in Fashion Week and everything. She’s a full hand user. I’m the most popular partial hand user, I like to think.”
Aramburo said he is just happy to be able to live life on his own terms.
“When I was in the hospital, sometimes I would share rooms with people who were close to dying,” he said. “I was in bed 20 hours a day I kept thinking to myself ‘How did I get here?’ I would imagine myself trying to shake someone’s hand or get a promotion wearing a suit and not having a hand. I thought I screwed up every aspect of my life. The other day I booked a flight to Thailand. I’m going by myself for New Year’s. I didn’t know that was going to be possible. My injury does not hold me back in any way.”