Heroes
Marc Possover
Not content with his life as a highly respected surgeon, he’s now working miracles, helping paraplegics to get back on their feet. With his pioneering new operation, patients can now lead much more independent lives Words: Werner Jessner Photography: Philipp Horak
Name Dr Marc Possover Born January 22, 1963, France Lives Zurich, Switzerland Profession Surgeon Achievements Father of neuropelveology, reviewer for the organisation Best Doctors, member of the World’s Leading Surgeons Web www.possover.de
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Ever wondered what would annoy you the most – after the initial anger – if you were to become a paraplegic? Fate, God, human impotence, the pizzas at the rehabilitation clinic? The fact that you couldn’t play football? The fact that you can’t get a book down off the shelf without someone’s help? The young Marc Possover, aged just five, had a view based on his own experience. His best friend’s father had become a paraplegic after an accident at work. Marc the child found the endless tapping on a naked man’s bladder to empty it unpleasant. He didn’t think the wheelchair was so bad: that was just a funny kind of bike. Then he forgot about it all for 10 years. He finished school, moving up three classes along the way. Not only did he outstrip his twin sister, now a sports teacher, he also overtook his twoyears-older ‘big sis’. By the time he was 16 he was studying medicine, which is what he’d always wanted to do, bar a brief period in his youth. “The alternative would have been competitive swimming, but a couple of years before I had to make a serious decision, the swimming pool burned down.” Possover’s father was a tailor. His mother was interested in medicine, but there was no chance of her pursuing it as a career after the war, even less as she was a woman. But Marc did get the chance and was lucky to receive good training – never guaranteed in medicine – thanks to good teachers. That’s how things were in medicine in France at the time. You didn’t have to specialise young then, as you do today; you were given three or four months on every ward. At 22 years of age, Marc Possover became Dr Marc Possover, graduating, need it be said, with top marks. To make sure he wasn’t under-stretching himself by merely being a heart surgeon, Possover became a gynaecologist too, for good measure. But why is it that a gynaecologist and heart surgeon – admittedly a very gifted one – should come to be the solution to
one of the most pressing problems for paraplegics? First, because he could. Secondly, because he doesn’t break down medicine into categories. “I’ve always started out with the patients and their problems,” he says. “How can I improve their lives? There’s a lot we don’t know and can’t do when it comes to the human body.” Possover has always been more interested in concrete problems and solutions than the question of whether his research suits the system. As he was soon considered one of the best gynaecologists in the world, awkward cases started landing on his desk: hysterectomies and cervix removals, bowel resections. Possover, now a professor, has performed more than 2000 such operations. The human pelvis – especially the lower, narrower section – became his second home. Evolution has placed particularly valuable body parts under the protection of man’s largest bone including vital nerves which range in size from millimetre-thin to as thick as a finger. Possover calls the lesser pelvis “the body’s crossroads”. As a gynaecologist he understood that anyone who delves into this delicate area had to proceed as cautiously as possible. On average, a paraplegic still gets two urinary tract infections a year. And the problem isn’t just that this sort of inflammation has a negative effect on scar tissue in the spinal cord. Until the 1970s, kidney failure was the number-one cause of death in paraplegics. To this day, this creeping internal poisoning is countered with indwelling catheters, but the relatively basic operations to insert them, while remedying bladder problems, are irreversible, as they destroy nerve tracts. This is unacceptable from Possover’s point of view: “If I want to pick an apple off a tree, I can either go and fetch a ladder or cut the tree down. I still get the apple. But what about the future? Any surgeon’s paramount rule must be respect.” Even as a gynaecologist, his logic was that one function