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Severed hand grafted to man’s foot in emergency survival procedure

Chinese doctors reportedly kept a man's severed hand alive by grafting the limb to his ankle.

Xiao Wei (25) suffered the extreme injury as a result of a machinery accident in the factory where he works.

But medics could not re-attach the right hand to his arm when Mr Wei attended the hospital but the tissue would have died before the surgery was complete.

In an incredible turn of events, the hand was instead transplanted to Mr Wei's left ankle in order to gain access to the blood supply from leg arteries. 

Surgeons were then able to remove the surviving hand and reattached it to its rightful place 35 days later.

“I just thought it was miraculous,” Wei can be heard telling a news agency in the attached video clip.

“I would never have thought my hand could be saved.”

The hospital has said that a great deal of rehabilitation is still needed for the hand to function better than a prosthetic hand.

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