You are right.

But it was not so much desperate measures as downright stupid measures. Granted, his local authority maybe could have taken notice and explained what was going on to him a bit better; maybe they had and this was not covered by the media reports. Maybe they had totally ignored him after his initial query.
But it needs to be stressed that his self-amputation appears to have failed since the pain has moved up his arm – a clear indication that, for the most part, the pain is more in his mind than it was in his hand: a ‘phantom’ pain in his nerves, rather than actual damage to his hand. He has given the authorities until December to sort out his pain or he will go through the whole procedure again, but from the elbow – where does he go to if that fails too? The shoulder?

Maybe giving the story the title ‘silly news’ (part of a series of occasional posts) was not the greatest idea, but the story is one that might be recalled for years to come: the man who chopped off his own hand with a hand made guillotine, the man who went out of his way to make sure he beat the pain – but failed. I hope he gets the help he (obviously) needs and gets the pain sorted out, but there had to have been better ways of going about it.