18-Year-Old Chinese Worker Gets Claws For Hands After Factory Accident Mutilated His Fingers
Doctors spent nine hours in an attempt to sew two fingers back on each hand of a Chinese factory worker. Eighteen-year-old Wang Jin now has hands similar to pincers.
Jin was rushed to Xiangya Hospital in China earlier in December after his hands were caught in a hammering machine at a factory where he worked. Both hands were destroyed at the wrists, with most of the fingers mutilated beyond repair — but that didn’t stop surgeons from reconstructing two fingers for each hand, which are now seemingly poised like claws. Two weeks later, Jin could move his fingers.
“The most challenging part was bone structure and finger rebuilding, connecting vessels of different sizes, and making sure blood circulation could be resumed,” Professor Tang Juyu told the Daily Mail. Surgeons attached Jin’s left pinky finger and right thumb to the right hand, and managed to keep his index and ring finger on his left hand.
Plenty of stories have surfaced from China in the past several years that involve doctors saving cut off limbs by reattaching them to other body parts, such as the hand that was sewn to a patient’s leg to keep it alive. The patient, whose entire arm had been flattened in an accident, was later able to see his hand successfully reattached to his arm. There was also the incident of a nose grown on a man's forehead, after his face was heavily injured in a road accident. The procedure implemented is called flap prefabrication, which is used in reconstructive plastic surgery.