Doctors in China’s Changsha hospital performed an extraordinary surgery to save a man’s severed hand by attaching it to his leg for a month before they reattached his hand back to his wrist.
The month long gap was maintained between the two surgeries to give the nerves and tendons in his wrist time to heal from the trauma.
The incident happened after a factory worker called Zhou had his left hand chopped off during a work accident involving a spinning blade machine, as reported in The Daily Mail.
Dr Tang Juyu, head of microsurgery at the hospital, decided he could give Zhou a chance to ‘revive’ his lost hand – with an operation he and his team had already successfully performed once in 2013 under similar circumstances.
Because both Zhou’s arm and severed hand were badly wounded following the accident, doctors were unable to attach it right away, opting instead to allow the nerves and tendons to heal with time.
This meant Dr Tang and his team decided to graft Zhou’s left hand to his right ankle.
Dr Tang explained: ‘Under normal temperatures, a severed finger needs to resume blood supply within 10 hours, but that time is even shorter for a separated limb.
‘If a limb is short of blood for too long, its tissues die and it will be unsalvageable.’
Mr Zhou’s hand was kept ‘alive’ and left to heal while attached to his ankle for more than one month.
Then Dr Tang and his team have now successfully reattached it to his arm in a 10-hour surgery.
