He was cutting wood and almost lost his arm. The blade completely cut through the soft tissue and one of the two bones of the man’s forearm. However, the specialists at St Luke’s Hospital of the First Medical Association of Lviv managed to save the arm from amputation.
The patient: 64-year-old Ivan Malashnyak from Lviv. The man was injured in late September when he was doing some housework and sawing wood with a grinder. The grinder accidentally snatched out of Ivan’s hands and almost completely severed his left limb. However, the man was not at a loss and immediately called his son for help. The latter took his father to St Luke’s Hospital, where they specialise in such injuries.
The blade went through the entire arm and actually cut it off at the level of the forearm. Only the ulna remained intact.
Traumatologists were the first to start saving the limb. They fused the parts of the radius and fixed them with an external fixation apparatus. Next, the reconstructive surgeons started working on the hand, suturing the median and ulnar nerves and performing soft tissue plastic surgery.
A month passed after the surgery, but the fracture of the radius still did not fuse up due to a large bone defect. To close it, the traumatologists took a graft from the man’s pelvic bone and fixed it with a metal plate.
Another problem that needed to be solved was the severe pain the patient was suffering from.
“The patient’s ulnar nerve was being compressed by the scarred tissue. This caused painful and burning sensations in the forearm, little finger and ring finger. We opened the cubital canal through which the ulnar nerve passes, released it and moved it higher. And to prevent the nerve from scarring again, we covered it with pericardial connective tissue from the pig’s heart,” explained Maria Kuzeykiv, a reconstructive hand surgeon at St Luke’s Hospital.
All four operations were successful. The patient’s hand was saved.
More than four months have passed since the accident. Now Mr Ivan is working with physical and occupational therapists twice a week to develop his injured limb and regain his self-care skills. It will take time to fully restore the function of his left arm – at least six months, rehabilitation specialists say.