Man lives with hand attached to ankle while waiting for reattachment surgery

A factory worker's chopped off hand was grafted onto his ankle for around a month, in order to keep the hand alive until the proper surgery could be conducted. This is not the first time Chinese surgeons attached and saved a hand with this method.

MUNTINLUPA, PHILIPPINES (Catholic Online) - Identified as Zhou, the factory worker severed his hand from his arms with a spinning blade machine during an accident inside the plant he was working at. The man was rushed to the Xiangya Hospital in Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, central China.

Zhou was attended to by the head of microsurgery at the hospital, Dr. Tang Juyu, and received an operation that had gave him the chance of "reviving" the severed hand.

Surgeons were unsuccessful t reattaching the hand to his arm at that moment, because of the degree of damages that needed to heal first in his nerves and tendons. Because of the longer period of time the surgeons needed for the reattachment operations, the doctors grafted the hand onto the leg of the patient, keeping it "alive" until the arm healed.

"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," said Dr. Juyu in an interview with the Telegraph UK. Zhou's hand was sewn back to his arm and has since regained feelings in the fingers, but rehabilitation will still take months to complete.

Back in 2013, another worker, Xiao Wei, also severed his hand off after an industrial accident. He was initially told the doctors in the local hospital could not save his hand and was transferred into a hospital in Changsha were the surgeons performed a procedure similar to Zhou's.

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