Doctors save little boy from walking on prosthetic leg

A train chopped off the boy's shank beneath the knee and smashed one-third of his leg

It took the boy too much time to collect the toys from the railway tracks: the train was approaching too fast. When the boy came to his senses, he saw a puddle of blood, his horrified friends in tears and a mutilated stump of his leg. The boy's weeping mother took her crippled son to a hospital. The grandfather found the cut shank in the grass near the tracks and brought the limb to the hospital too.

Surgeons hesitated about the possibility to reattach the chopped leg of the boy. “Too much time has passed since the accident. The stump was dirty, and it remained under the hot sun for quite a while too,” the chief surgeon of the local hospital said.

Alexander Borzih, the chief of the department for microsurgery and rehabilitation treatment of the Donetsk Medical University, ventured to take a risk and operate the boy. The operation started at 8 p.m. and ended at 4 a.m. The team of professional surgeons successfully completed the operation, the work of which could be compared to jeweler's art.

A train wheel does not leave a lot of chances for surgeons to recreate human tissue from mashed muscles, cords, skin and bones. The boy, Vlad Danilchenko, lost a part of his leg beneath the knee. In addition, the train smashed one-third of the leg. The doctors had to remove some 17 centimeters of the leg and recreate the blood supply in the extremity.

Surgeons of the microsurgical department of the Donetsk Medical University have performed about 300 replantation operations since 1987. One of the patients was a miner, who lost his foot in a work accident in the beginning of the 1990s. The doctors successfully reattached the severed foot: the grateful man brings cakes to the doctors every year, on the day of his miraculous recovery. Needless to say that the man is eternally grateful to the doctors, who saved him from life on prosthetic foot and crutches.

Alexander Borzih performed his first operation in 1984. Three years later he organized the department for microsurgery in Donetsk, Ukraine.

The boy has left the reanimation department of the hospital: he can walk on crutches already. The doctor promised that the leg would heal and the boy would lead the life of a normal man in the future.

Photo by Trud.Ru