A bold move to save a man’s hand: Tucking it into his tummy

Casey Reyes struggled for a way to explain the sci-fi surgery doctors were proposing to save her 87-year-old grandfather’s badly burned hand. “They’re gonna put your hand inside your stomach, kind of like a hoodie,” she told him. Frank Reyes agreed to the strange operation at Houston Methodist Hospital, and spent three weeks with his left hand surgically tucked under a pocket of tissue in his belly to give it time to heal and form a new blood supply. On Thursday, doctors cut his hand free of its temporary home and shaped some of the abdominal tissue and skin to cover it.

I thought it was more or less something out of a sci-fi movie. It sounded crazy.

Grand-daughter Casey Reyes

Reyes hopes for near-full use of the hand he almost lost after a freak accident earlier this summer while he was changing a tyre. Surgeries like this — temporarily attaching one body part to another, or tucking it under skin — are by no means new, but they are uncommon. They are used on the battlefield, in trauma situations, and increasingly in research as a way to incubate lab-grown body parts from scaffold-like materials. Dr Anthony Echo, plastic surgeon at Houston Methodist, thought of it when he saw Reyes. Echo realised a skin graft or flap of tissue from another part of Reyes’ body would not work. The damage was down to the bone, and without a good blood supply, a graft or flap would die, he explained.

It gives you phenomenal results, especially in this type of injury, with minimal complications.

Dr. Vijay Gorantla, a plastic surgeon and hand transplant expert

Health hand transplant