Voice box surgery a doctor's new challenge

DETROIT - The little boy who would grow up to become a surgeon at the University of Michigan learned right away - parts is parts.

Douglas Chepeha started out as a carpenter, making boats and decks and furniture out of scraps of wood; and then, he took that same mental approach into surgery.

That's how he saved Sherry Wittenberg's voice: He removed part of her shoulder blade and inserted it into her voice box, like a strange home renovation project inside a human body.

Chepeha views the human body as a Home Depot for body parts. Although other surgeons have used part of the sternum for transplants, Chepeha harvested the tip of Wittenberg's shoulder blade because it had a natural curve and was wrapped with a chunk of muscle with a good blood supply.

Wittenberg's voice isn't perfect. Once a singer in a choir, she can't really hold a tune anymore. But she can talk. And she can still work in telephone sales.

To fully appreciate this groundbreaking surgery, you have to start at the beginning. The day Chepeha received his first tool set.

Chepeha was about 31/2 when his grandfather gave him a saw and hammer. He became infatuated with building small, simple boats out of wood scraps.

"I built about 200 boats by the time I was 6 or 7," said Chepeha, who grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, in a working-class, hockey-loving, blue-collar neighborhood.

As a college student, he ran a small construction company. "I built decks and fences and did landscaping and gutted basements," he said. "When I first got married, I built most of the furniture for my house because I couldn't afford to buy new."

All of that training as a carpenter - how to use tools and plan a job and do everything with precision, while using scraps of material for different projects - proved to be an ideal training for a surgeon.

"Really, a surgeon is a glorified tradesman," Chepeha said. "All those amazing sheet metal guys make those amazing copper roofs and those amazing carpenters make unbelievable furniture. I think surgeons do the same thing. But I'm working on a human, so the stakes are a little higher. But in terms of technical skills, I don't think there is any difference."

Chepeha once took skin off a woman's arm and used it to reconstruct a tongue.