In a rare surgery, doctors at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital rejoined three fingers including index, middle and ring finger and reconstructed a thumb with a toe finger in a 44-year-old patient from Uttarakhand who had suffered an industrial injury. The patient, a factory worker, severed his index, middle, ring finger and a thumb during an accident at his unit in Uttrakhand.
Patient arrived at Sir Ganga ram hospital in the evening around 8 hrs after injury, bleeding profusely bringing the severed 3 fingers in a polythene bag but the thumb was not present in the bag.
According to Dr. Mahesh Mangal, Chairman, Department of Plastic & Cosmetic Surgery, Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, “The challenge for us was not only to rejoin the three crushed fingers back to hand but the biggest challenge was to reconstruct the missing thumb. For this we decided thumb reconstruction by 2nd toe transfer from right foot of the patient to make his hand fully functional.”
For this a team was formed under Dr. Mahesh Mangal which consisted of Dr. S.S. Gambhir, Dr. Nikhil Jhunjhunwala and Dr. Pooja Gupta from the Department of Plastic and Reconstructive surgery, and Dr. Manish Dhawan from the Department of Orthopaedics. Patient was immediately shifted to OT and after 10 hours long microsurgery all the three fingers were reimplanted (rejoined) by joining the blood vessel, nerve, bones and tendons under microscope . Since the thumb was not brought, thumb reconstruction was planned by 2nd toe transfer from right foot to make his hand fully functional.
Microsurgery was started in 1981 in The Department of Plastic surgery at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, Delhi.
Dr. Mangal, says since then the department has grown to become a center of excellence in Reimplantation of cut body parts due to industrial, agricultural, household, road traffic accidents, etc.
“They had two more patients in the same week, all of them in different age groups and at different levels of amputation with different mode of trauma,” hospital said in a statement.