"I was scalped by a box-making machine," says Christine Lippincott. She was working in a factory in Greensboro, North Carolina, and her attention wandered. "It caught my hair from behind and ripped it right off in a second, from the back of my neck to my eyebrows." Gushing blood, Lippincott fainted. Coworkers carefully extricated her scalp from the box machine, packed it in ice, and rushed it and her to the local hospital. A helicopter took her to Duke University Medical Center in Durham, where plastic surgeon L. Scott Levin sewed her scalp back on, meticulously reconnecting its blood supply in a six-hour operation.
But the crisis wasn't over. Levin could see that blood was flowing through the reattached arteries into Lippincott's replanted scalp. But it wasn't flowing out very well through her veins, which are vulnerable to clots and increased pressure. So Levin did what many up-to-date surgeons would ...
