In a bizarre first, the South China Morning Post reports, doctors in China have surgically grafted a patient’s severed ear to her foot.
The patient, a woman identified by their surname Sun, suffered a horrific workplace accident involving heavy machinery which tore off a large part of her scalp and her ear with it, according to Qiu Shenqiang, deputy director of the microsurgery unit at Shandong Provincial Hospital in Jinan.
The damage to her scalp and vascular network was so severe that restoring the ear at the time was impossible, so the procedure was performed to save the patient’s aural orifice so it could be reattached to her head later.
The scalp, neck, and face had been torn and “split into multiple fragments, Qiu said, via SCMP, while the ear had been “completely severed along with the scalp.” The team tried to immediately repair it, but they came up against a grim medical reality: the skull needed more time — months, at least — to heal.
You can’t simply put a body part on ice for that long, so the surgical team opted for a radical approach: save the ear by attaching it to somewhere else on the body. Per SCMP, Qiu said they chose the foot because the arteries and veins there are compatible with those found in the ear. The foot’s skin and soft tissue are also similarly thin to the head’s.
The choice made sense in theory, but it was still a risk. Attaching a body part to a different site to preserve it, known as a heterotopic graft, is not uncommon during procedures like organ transplants. But doing this with an ear and foot had no precedent in medical history.
Nonetheless, Qiu’s team pulled it off. The initial grafting took ten hours, during which the surgeons meticulously connected the complex web of delicate veins.
But complications arose five days later, when the ear turned purplish black as its connecting veins struggled to send blood back to the heart, causing the blood to pool. Over the next five days, the team rescued the ear with manual bloodletting, a labor intensive process that required almost five hundred individual interventions.
Once the ear was stabilized, the team gradually restored the patient’s scalp. Five months on from the accident, the scalp and neck had healed enough, and the team returned the ear to its proper place.
The procedure was performed in October. The patient has now been discharged from the hospital, with her face and tissue function largely recovered, SCMP reported.
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