Four-hr surgery restores 2-yr-old's finger

The Srivastav family had never even imagined that a casual evening visit to the nearby mall would be such a horrifying experience for them.

The Srivastav family had never even imagined that a casual evening visit to the nearby mall would be such a horrifying experience for them.

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In November, Mohit Srivastav, his wife Namrita and their 2-year and four-month-old son Aditya were in a jewellery store of a Gurgaon mall around 8.30pm when a glass show window that Aditya was playing with crashed on him and crushed the little finger of his left hand.

"When he came to us, the finger was hanging. It was amputated from the bone and was attached with just a single tendon," said Dr Sunil Choudhary, head of the department, Max Institute of Aesthetic and Reconstructive Surgery, Saket. Choudhary headed the surgical team of Dr Raghav Mantri, Dr Prateek Arora and Dr Madhubari Vathulya during a four-hour-long surgery.

The doctors fixed the bone and joined one artery and two veins. "Within four hours of the injury, we managed to get the finger going," said Mantri.

Doctors said the finger did not have a clean cut and as it was a crush injury, the team had to really struggle to find the ends of blood vessels to restore the blood supply to the finger.

This was just one of the challenges the team faced while performing the surgery.

And their biggest test was to stitch the vessels without damaging them because at his age Aditya's blood vessels were unusually small.

"Injury of this nature in a child so young is rare. His is perhaps the youngest reported case of successful finger replant. The blood vessels in a child are smaller and that of the little finger are even smaller," said Choudhary.

Aditya's blood vessels were as small as 0.3millimeter in diameter, and the smallest micro forceps that the team had, failed to go inside them. "I had to rely purely on my instincts and surgical skills while stitching the vessels," added Choudhary.

"We were completely zapped when the incident took place. I just took him in arms and rushed to the hospital. How I reached there, I don't know. The only thought at the top of my mind was that he must get his finger back," said Aditya's father Mohit.