But when Yush turned his analytical mind to solve social or emotional issues, his conclusions often worried me.
Yush saw his body as “another project,” Clark said. In an email exchange that she forwarded to me dated June 2017, Yush explained his reasons for wanting the procedure: “It’s definitely an unconventional decision,” he wrote, “but I think I’m being level-headed here.”
His research directed him to Dr. Jean-Marc Guichet, a French surgeon who developed a special surgical limb-lengthening technique that yielded faster, but presumably less painful, results. Though the surgery is also performed in the United States, where it can cost
upwards of $100,000, Yush believed Dr. Guichet was a world expert. “This procedure is pretty safe, with no recorded patient (of thousands) having ever been handicapped,” Yush’s email continued. “I insisted on seeing the stats with the doc.”
However, according to
the website for the New York-based Institute for Limb Lengthening & Reconstruction, the development of a pulmonary embolism is a rare, but possible, risk: “Pulmonary embolism and deep vein thrombosis... are rare with [limb lengthening] surgery, but they can occur and could lead to sudden shortness of breath, chronic leg swelling and even death.” The Paley Orthopedic and Spine Center in Florida
says on its website that “prevention is key” and that it sends “each patient home with a prescription for an anticoagulation drug” to prevent deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolisms.
Guichet told me that the surgery he provides is safer, and leads to fewer complications, than traditional limb-lengthening procedures. “99% of patients worldwide are operated on with external fixators, but I developed 33 years ago the only fully weight-bearing nail in the world at that time,” Guichet wrote via email. “Of course, it benefits a lot of patients and like all surgical procedures it has implications or complications, but far less than external fixators.” His website touts the ability to “recover walking, right after surgery,” among several success stories.
Nowhere does it mention that one of his patients died from a pulmonary embolism during the recovery period, nor does it list pulmonary embolism as one of the potential risks of the procedure. Citing privacy concerns, Guichet declined to discuss any aspect of Yush’s procedure or recovery with me unless I met him in person in Milan, but wrote in an email that patients “are obviously informed” about the risk of pulmonary embolisms and their symptoms. Guichet also said that he generally prescribes preventative medication to lessen the risk of pulmonary embolisms and informs patients what to do if symptoms of a pulmonary embolism occur. (I do not know how aware Yush was of such a risk, whether he was prescribed any medications to prevent its onset, or whether he knew what symptoms to identify should it develop.)
Clark, along with my parents and his friends, tried to talk Yush out of the surgery, but he refused to reconsider. “There’s a huge social stigma in our culture against body modification. Basically, if you change yourself through what sound like ‘extreme’ measures to change yourself or whatever, it comes off like you’re just really insecure,” Yush wrote in the email. “In the future, it’s probably going to be totally normal for people to get body modifications like cybernetic implants and stuff. At that time, getting longer legs is going to seem like a pretty mundane thing to do. I just don’t hold the same stigmas that other people do on how I should behave.”
Yush attempted to convince Clark that his decision was based on logic and not on insecurity. But in the medical industry, his relationship with his height could have been characterized as “height dysphoria,” a “dissatisfaction with one’s stature that affects a person’s mood and thoughts about themselves,” according to Ellen Katz Westrich, a clinical psychologist at New York University’s Langone Medical Center who assesses candidates for limb-lengthening surgery at the Institute for Limb Lengthening & Reconstruction. Because of the risks associated with limb-lengthening surgery—which includes long-term damage to nerves, limitation of joint motion, chronic pain, and in rare cases, pulmonary embolisms—Westrich
cautions that “although the procedure is performed for cosmetic reasons, it is not in the same dimension as other cosmetic procedures such as facelifts, breast augmentation and nose jobs.”
Westrich said that she sees many more men with height dysphoria than women. Men she’s counseled, she said, often “feel like they’re at a disadvantage. They feel like they’re not taken as seriously in terms of work environment. They feel like romantic partners don’t see them as being as attractive as they could be if they were taller,” she said. If that dissatisfaction becomes a fixation, however, in which a perceived lack of height turns into “an unhealthy obsession and preoccupation with a perceived physical imperfection,” a candidate might suffer from a form of Body Dysmorphic Disorder, making them a poor candidate for surgery. The condition is “on the spectrum of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and surgery is not going to correct that,” she explained. “It’s a psychological problem, and surgery is not going to address the fundamental problem.”
While the decisions he made were his own, I believe that Yush felt that society’s narrow confines of what it means to be a man—especially a brown man in America—offered him little choice. I see the pain of a sensitive boy who succumbed to the impossible, unforgiving demands of an unhealthy relationship tomasculinity; fostered by a patriarchal Indian-American household; and exacerbated within a male-dominated, libertarian tech industry where the success of certain men was treated as self-evident proof of their superiority.
Yush’s observations about power, masculinity, and his standing in the world were not incorrect. Research has shown that tall people are
richer and more successful, and
Western culture has a long history of trying to emasculate Asian-American men (East Asian men in particular) that can be traced to the 1800s, when Chinese men emigrating to the United States during the gold rush were viewed by whites as an economic and racial threat. Anti-miscegenation laws, formed in the 1660s to bar marriages between white people and black slaves and codify white racial purity, quickly expanded in the early 1900s to include the small but growing population of Asian-Americans in an effort to preserve whiteness. These laws remained on the books even after segregation ended, until 1967, the same year my Dadaji brought his wife and three children to Canada. Such laws are now relics of the past, but the stereotypes they codified persist.
In American movies and television, Indian men have historically been portrayed as nerdy and unable to attract women, like Raj in the
Big Bang Theory, or as thickly-accented human punchlines, like Apu on the
Simpsons. On dating site OkCupid, among men, Asians have the fewest responses—a statistic that Yush often cited, before he created an algorithm to attempt to improve his odds on the dating site.
yikes this has to be online females only thinking like this
