Chinese furniture worker Wang Yongjun had the misfortune of cutting off the tip of his middle finger after a less than pleasant encounter with an electric saw. Naturally, he was immediately rushed to the hospital where doctors surveyed the damage and tried to figure out what they could do to save the digit. The finger was pretty mangled. All the muscle and skin were completely gone from the tip; only the bone was showing. In a bid to save what was left of the finger, Doctor Huang Xuesong came up with a novel solution. In his words: “We had to make a quick decision or he could have lost his finger. We decided to cultivate a new fingertip on his stomach.”
The idea, apparently, was to try to restore blood flow to the damaged area so that the finger might be able to heal itself, at least in some respect. The hope is that skin and muscle will grow around the finger tip area. Granted, it wouldn’t be a fingertip in the conventional sense, but it’d probably be preferable to losing the entire finger. The surgery is said to have been a complete success, and Wang can look forward to having his new abomination of a fingertip surgically removed from his stomach in around a month.
My question, after looking at that picture for a while, is where did about half of that finger-to-stomach tissue come from?
The bit circled in red is clearly where the finger has been stitched to the, well, the um…what is that thing? It seems as if he just has a naturally occurring thumb-esque mass already protruding from his stomach. You can see where the finger and the “thing” were stitched together, but there doesn’t appear to be any evidence of surgery around the base of that thing circled in yellow. I mean, this idea of this surgery was to promote tissue growth, but that can’t be the tissue growth we’re talking about, right? What is that thing? It’s way more than a fingertip.
Whatever the case, hopefully Wang’s new finger-let will be enough to get him by in his day-to-day life. Until it gets surgically removed though, I sure hope he doesn’t reflexively try and move that hand too far from his stomach. It could get ugly.
(via Orange News)
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