Doctors reattach severed arm

A circular saw cut man's arm off in a second. It took doctors six hours to put it back

Ilyas Suleimanov from the city of Ufa went to visit his mother in Slak village. On Monday he decided to repair an old fence. The man was working with a circular saw. In the evening, the saw was clogged with sawdust. Ilyas started cleaning it, but he forgot to disconnect the saw from the power supply.

The man stumbled and his arm slipped to the saw's disc. In just a second the arm was hanging on a piece of skin. Everything happened instantly. Ilyas was so shocked, he did not even feel the pain. The man's wife ran to his scream. Ilyas was taken to a hospital in the district center. Needless to mention, he became an extraordinary patient for local doctors, but the horrible trauma did not confuse them. They fixed the arm to the stump, put the arm in plaster and took the patient to the city of Ufa.

”The man arrived in severe condition an urgent operation was needed. The man lost his arm four hours ago. The operation would be impossible two hours later,” surgeon Salavat Tuguzbayev said.

It took doctors about six hours to perform the operation. At first, they connected the bones, then arteries and veins, retrieved the connection between muscles and put the skin in stitches.

Ten days later Ilyas said he felt his arm was warm. The man will have to stay in hospital for a month. Doctors will be observing him for about a year after he leaves the hospital.

Microsurgery is one of the leading medical practices. It is used in vascular and neurosurgery, in traumatology, eye surgery and other branches of medicine where microscopes are used.

The development of microsurgery started in the 1960s, when a Polish doctor successfully re-attached a hand to his patient. The idea was then spread in the world in the beginning of the 1970s.

In Moscow, the department of microsurgery was founded at the Scientific Center of Surgery. The microsurgical department in Ufa, the republic of Bashkortostan, exists since 1983. Microsurgeons of Ufa often help patients from all regions of Russia. The Ufa-based department of microsurgery performs very complicated and unique operations, the transplantation of bones, for example.

In theory, it is possible to re-attach any severed part of the human body. A re-attached hand or finger does not surprise anyone now. Nevertheless, there was an incident in the history of medicine, when Cuban doctors attached a corpse's hand to a living individual.

If such an accident occurs, the wound should be bandaged, but not braided. A cut-off body part should be put in a plastic bag. Another plastic bag with cold water and ice should put into it. One should not treat the wound with spirit or an antiseptic. An operation can be successful if a patient is operated in not less than 12 hours after the accident.

There are six doctors working at the microsurgical department in Ufa at present moment. They perform 400 or 500 operations a year. As a rule, more than a half of them are urgent. Microsurgeons can reconstructure or enhance breasts, cure male and female infertility and the scarring deterioration of tissues.