JanineTexting your arm off
December 3rd 2008 11:41
Shoulders are complicated joints.. (photo: NIH).
The incredibly gory details are such that the boy's arm was very badly damaged (the reason was unclear - but I think our imaginations are quite capable of filling in the gaps) and had become infected. It was gangrenous, so the boy had only two or three days to live.
Thankfully Dr David Nott is a general and vascular surgeon, so clearly has skills in wielding a scalpel but hadn't ever done such an amputation before. He says he remembered a colleague had and so asked for instructions, which were duly texted back to him, step by step.
The surgery involved removing the shoulder blade and collar bone, and Dr Nott completed it using only one pint of blood...
The good news is that the teenager made a full recovery. But the mind boggles as to how you send through details specific enough to be able to amputate someone's arm, including removal of other supporting structures and so on...
For anyone interested in the surgical aspects of shoulder disarticulation and subsequent amputation, this article concentrates on tumours etc, but it highlights that the surgery is more than slightly involved.
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