Reconstruction surgeries to fix the severed limbs have come up ages in Cuttack, and last week a new chapter was added to it when in a rare case an avulsed hand of a young girl was repaired after a marathon eight-hour-long surgery in a private hospital here.
A team of doctors led by eminent plastic surgeon Bibhuti Bushan Naik performed the surgery at his newly-setup facility at Gopalpur on the outskirts of the city on August 25, and the patient, Bharati Sahoo, an undergraduate science student of Podamari village in Ganjam district, is recuperating fast.
This was a challenging case before the surgeons as the right hand of the promising student was detached at the forearm after it accidentally came in contact with a rotating machine. The severed body part was brought here after six hours of the accident from a location more than 250 km away from here.
“Blood vessels were badly damaged, the twin bones of the forearm were crushed, and muscle tissues were trampled with no sign of nerve tendons,” Dr Naik said, adding that thankfully, the severed hand was properly preserved in an ice box and was brought to the SBM Plastic Surgery Hospital here without any further damage. “While three important blood vessels of the hand were coupled by vein-grafting, the twin bones of radio-ulna were fixed with steel plates and the muscles and tendons were repaired,” Naik said and added that after a fortnight, seeing the limb condition, the broken nerves would be repaired. With six months of physiotherapy, she would be able to get back about 70 per cent functioning of the hand, he added.
A confident Bharati, the eldest of three children of her parents, said she would go back to her village soon after being fully cured.