Doctors reattach man's severed right arm

MYSURU: When 23-year-old S Pratap was knocked down by a lorry on May 30, his future looked bleak. For, a chain attached to the vehicle got stuck in the farmer's hand and severed his entire right arm.

Two months later, he is now looking to get his hands dirty in the farm, thanks to the doctors at Apollo BGS Hospitals, who reattached his arm hours during an intensive five-hour surgery. His arm has regained partial functionality now.

"I was shattered and had no hopes of getting my hand back, but the doctors gave me back my life," Pratap said thanking the hospital's consultant plastic surgeon Dr Narayan Hegde, and senior orthopaedics consultant Dr Balakrishna Gowda T N, who performed a surgery on him at a short notice and reattache d his arm. When Pratap met with the accident at Kollegal, nearly 40 km from Mysuru, passersby rushed him to a nearby hospital. As the doctors were not able to perform a surgery there, they referred him to Apollo BGS Hospitals immediately.

Dr Hegde said, "This was a very tough case. As the arm had been torn apart, its survival chances were bleak. When a body part gets severed, it should be properly covered and kept in a cold storage and brought within six hours of the incident. But in this case, it was brought to the hospital after nearly seven hours of the accident. However, with proper surgical technique we were able to reattach arm successfully."

According to him, further surgical procedures and consistent physiotherapy sessions are required to improve functioning of the arm.

"It will take another two to three years for return to normalcy," he added.