No, it’s not the Dutch horror film “The Human Centipede,” but its gruesome theme is strikingly similar — attaching a body part to unnatural locations of the human body.
About a month ago, a drilling machine sawed off the right hand of 25-year-old Wei Xie in Changde, in central China’s Hunan Province.
But it took seven hours before Mr. Xie received medical attention, and his severed hand’s tissues would have died by the time the doctors complete the reattachment surgery. To solve the problem, doctors, in a seemingly unprecedented and bizarre move, temporarily attached the patient’s hand to his ankle to save the tissue.
It wasn’t until the 35th day that doctors removed the hand from the “host” ankle and reattached the hand to his arm.
Mr. Xie reportedly said that the entire operation was indeed “miraculous,” and that he never expected his “hand could be saved.”
The freshly attached hand still lacks the basic sensations and motor functions, and the hospital staff said that much rehabilitation is needed to enable it to “function better than a prosthetic hand.”