Meet Hong Kong’s replantation specialists, who have given hope to hundreds of patients with severed limbs
Team of surgeons, nurses, occupational therapists and physiotherapists gave a young man who had lost most of his hand a new lease of life by attaching one of his toes onto his damaged limb
Thirteen years ago, a 19-year-old Hong Kong man whose right hand was crushed by a machine making fishballs was rushed to a local hospital.
It was the man’s first day at his factory job and he had ended up losing four fingers, orthopaedic surgeon Dr Ho Pak-cheong recalled.
“He was only 19 years old and left with a thumb … no matter what [we] needed to figure out a way to help him,” he said.
Paramedics who helped the man were able to salvage the severed fingers and Dr Ho and his team managed to reattach them – through a surgical process called replantation.
But they quickly found that the severed fingers were already infected with bacteria from the fresh fish used in the fishball machine. They had to undo the procedure and instead chose to take the patient’s second toe from his left foot and transplant it to his right hand, in between where his index and middle finger once were.
