Dinesh Kumar Gope at Orchid Medical Centre in Ranchi on Friday. Picture by Hardeep Singh

Doctors at Ranchi’s Orchid Medical Centre have successfully conducted a thumb reconstruction surgery on a 22-year-old youth.

The right thumb of Dinesh Kumar Gope, from Ormanjhi village on Ranchi outskirts, got cleanly hacked by a hay-cutting machine on May 22. The local doctor failed to re-attach the thumb to his hand.

Gope, advised by a friend, came to Orchid Hospital in the capital on May 23 with the severed right thumb.

“It was too late to attach the limb. Attempts to re-attach severed human limbs are made when a patient comes fast, say within six hours of the accident,” said Pankaj Kumar, the hospital’s plastic and micro-vascular surgeon. “So I decided to reconstruct it with the bone of the severed thumb,” he added.

In usual reconstruction surgeries, the hand is normally fixed to the thigh and kept in such a position for up to four weeks, detached only once new thumb cells, skin and muscles are formed. “It is a time-taking process, involving two surgeries and is inconvenient for the patient,” he added.

So the surgeon decided in favour of a single surgery.

“I used single micro-surgical technique to reconstruct his thumb, taking muscle and skin from his arm. The process took four hours,” Kumar, who led the team of doctors during the operation on May 24 morning, said.

The hospital’s public relations manager Santosh Singh claimed such a surgery was rare in the state.

Gope was discharged from the hospital on Friday., thumb in the right place.