Clinical rejection of my hand had only been one of my problems after the operation. When I’d first woken after fifteen hours of anaesthesia, my mind had been like cotton wool, and waves of nausea had swept over me. But I could still remember my surgeon, Harry Bryant, also known as Harry the Hands, standing next to the bed asking me to try and move the fingers on my left hand.

Was he crazy? my muddled brain had thought at the time. I don’t have a left hand.

Except, of course, I now did, and there it was, right next to my head in a sort of sling, pointing upward, with my new fingers sticking out above the bandages. I remembered looking at those alien sausage-like appendices, stained yellow by an iodine solution, and wondering if I’d done the right thing.

‘Can you move them?’ Harry the Hands had asked.

For many years, I’d controlled my prosthesis by sending impulses to the muscles in my arm. The electrical signals had been picked up by sensors on the skin and, over time, I had learned to use those nerve messages to rotate the wrist and open and close the fake fingers. But the stimuli I sent to activate the electric motors weren’t the ones I had previously used to control my real fingers, those I’d been born with.

So used was I to this indirect control of my mechanical digits, that I now sent the same message to my arm. Needless to say, the new flesh fingers did not budge one iota.

But Harry had been well ahead of me.

‘Open and close the fingers on your right hand.’

I had done that. I hadn’t even had to think much about it. My brain had just sent the signals and the fingers moved. Easy-peasy.

‘Now do the same to both hands simultaneously.’

Both of us had stared at the new fingertips, and there had been just the faintest of twitches, nothing substantial but more than enough to satisfy Harry, who smiled broadly.

‘Well done. We must have connected something right, anyway. That will do for now. You need to rest.’

He had then departed but, for several hours after, I had marvelled at the slight movement my new fingers could make whenever I wanted them to. And I still marvelled at it three years later.

Those three years had involved months of physiotherapy stimulating not only the reconnecting of the motor nerves but also the sensory ones, to the point where I could now feel the vast majority of the skin surface, and I could pick up, maybe not a needle, but certainly a coin.

However, the rejection issue remained, and I would need to continue taking my immunosuppressant medications for the rest of my life. So I now swallowed the six tablets I took every night to keep my hand intact, and made ready for another night alone in my bed.