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Two days after his right hand froze, Hart Bezner realized for the first time that he might lose it.

The retired physics professor was sitting in an emergency room in Whitehorse, the capital of Canada’s Yukon territory, where two doctors and a pharmacist were taking an unusual amount of interest in the appendage and the pink blisters that now covered it. 

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“Will I lose my hand?” he remembers asking. “Will this go away?”

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