SUBSIM Radio Room Forums - It was a surgery no one wanted to work on

A wonderful story! :up:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/12/17...ant/index.html

It was a surgery no one wanted to work on -- a Finnish man had accidentally chopped off his hand in the forest. Reattaching his hand required hours of meticulously connecting the arteries, tendons and bones together. Dr. Maria Siemionow, a reconstructive surgeon, jumped at the chance to take part.

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2008/HE...nt.surgeon.jpg Dr. Maria Siemionow has had medical and ethical clearance for a full facial transplant since 2004.

The hand that was white in one room became pink in another room connecting to the patient," Siemionow told CNN two years ago, describing how blood flow revived the once-severed hand. It was, she said, "a powerful event, which kind of led me to think that technically we can do so much and you can make patients that are disabled one day, being able to come back to society the next day."

On Wednesday, Siemionow, the head of plastic surgery research at the Cleveland Clinic, is expected to announce the completion of another complex surgery -- a near-total face transplant.

The face transplant surgery done two weeks ago by a team of eight surgeons at the Cleveland, Ohio hospital, is the first of its kind conducted in the United States.