Dr. Braden Gammon remembers the surge of adrenaline he felt when he rushed to an operating room three years ago to see a patient whose hand had been crushed in a piece of farm equipment.

The young farmer had lost four fingers, but Gammon, an Ottawa surgeon who specializes in hand and wrist surgery, wanted to take a shot at putting the mangled hand back together.

Working through the night, Gammon slowly reattached each finger, carefully setting bones, connecting tendons and sewing together blood vessels no wider than a strand of spaghetti.

The 15-hour operation was a success. But it took two-and-a-half years before Gammon said the provincial government reimbursed him for his work. Until then, the only payment he had received since the November 2022 surgery was a jug of maple syrup from t

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