Story By: John Feng, Sub Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Asia Wire Report

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT

This is the top of a young boy’s index finger hanging by just a tiny bit of skin with the bone exposed after he almost chopped it off with medics racing “against time” to save it.

The unnamed patient, aged eight, was treated at Xuzhou Renci Hospital in China’s eastern Jiangsu Province.

Surgeon Zhang Jichao called the operation “a race against time” as the boy was treated at a local hospital three hours after the accident before reaching Xuzhou a further three hours later.

Pictures Credit: AsiaWire

Ideally, a severed digit has the best chance of survival if reattached within six hours of an accident, Doctor Zhang revealed.

But when the medics started working on the boy’s finger, it had already been more than six hours since he had severed it.

Pictures of the boy’s left index finger shows it hanging by a thin layer of skin, and his bones are clearly visible where he has cut clean through it with the blade.

“Surgery to reattach fingers is a race against time. If delayed for too long, it can affect whether the digit is able to fully recover its function,” Doctor Zhang said.

The medic said the boy’s blood vessels and nerves were successfully reattached under a microscope, and they were relieved to see colour return to his fingertip after the operation.

The boy is in stable condition and can expect to be discharged from hospital soon, Zhang added.

He is expected to make a full recovery.

Doctor Zhang said: “Every orthopaedic surgeon has one conviction [about a severed body part]: as long as there’s a 1 percent chance, we have to try and reattach it.”

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