When a person receives a limb donation, how do surgeons “wire up” the nerves so that the recipient can use the limb and feel sensation from it?
In: Biology
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I didn’t lose a limb but came very close to it. I ripped a slightly larger than an adult male’s fist, sized hole out of my forearm, exposing the bone and severing nerves and tendons to some of my fingers and my hand.
From what my dad told me, the surgeons cut my arm open wider and using microsurgery, stitched the nerves and tendons back together and I got a skin graft over the gaping hole in my arm, from my thigh.
The hardest part was lots of physio later, but they were so amazing and I was playing guitar and piano a little after a year. All the while realising how easily that it could have been my head (accident was on a mountain bike and impacting a Roughcast wall)
I had a sheet of glass fall on me at work last year, they wouldn’t intubate me for the repair surgery fearing they would need the machines for covid patients.
spent about 3 hrs watching two “micro plastic surgeons” (I think that was their titles) they literally cut my wound wider and used a metal clamp to hold the it open. then used a combination of methods to stitch and glue my nerves an tendons back together…. the craziest event out of it all was feeling my nerves “recalibrating”. I spent an entire night in bed unable to sleep, it felt like my hand was possessed an moving around wildly, yet I was watching it sit there perfectly still, wrapped tight in a fiberglass splint.
the sensations came and went for about a week and now about a year later I would say I’m pretty much recovered other then some numb spots on my palm.
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