A microsurgery expert from Istanbul has succeeded in re-implanting a finger that a man had lost in an accident in Malta.
A Turkish doctor has achieved success in medicine by reimplanting a finger at an engineer who worked in Malta, 19 hours after the amputation occurred, and after doctors in that European country assured him that there was nothing to do and that the only thing he could do with his finger was “dump” it.
The protagonist of this story and this little miracle for medical science is Berk Altınelli, a 29-year-old engineer who was working on a vessel near Malta when last February the index finger of his right hand was amputated during an accident; after putting the severed finger in ice, a helicopter rushed him to a hospital in Malta, but doctors there told him that there was nothing they could do to reimplant it.
To such an extent they considered his case lost that the doctors at the Maltese hospital told him that the only thing he could do with his finger preserved in ice was to “dump it.” Desperate, Altınelli then contacted a relative of his in Istanbul, a dentist by profession, to find out if it was possible to re-implant the amputated finger.
After several consultations, his family member contacted Mehmet Veli Karaaltın, an expert in microsurgery, who explained that any amputated limb had to be reimplanted within a maximum period of 9 hours, or else the tissues would begin to necrotise and the limb would lose all its functions. Despite the difficulty of the case, Karaaltın decided to accept the challenge and try to reattach the limb.
Time was running out, and there were no flights to Turkey
The odyssey, however, did not end there; Altınelli had to find a way to return to Turkey as soon as possible with his finger; a friend got him a small cooler to keep it in, and the engineer began looking eagerly for a plane to fly to Turkey – the problem was that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there were hardly any flights available.
Altınelli finally managed to find a flight to Istanbul, and with the portable refrigerator in his backpack he travelled to the Turkish metropolis, where an ambulance was waiting for him when he landed to take him to the hospital where he was to be operated. After a delicate operation that lasted 11 hours, his finger was reimplanted after being separated from the body for 19 hours, in what is probably the first operation of this type carried out successfully.
“No operation has been performed before in which a finger was reimplanted after such a long period and that it managed to function normally,” said Karaaltın, who acknowledged to the media that at first the operation seemed impossible “but I decided to assume the risk for this young man. It was a very difficult process for him, but he was lucky”.
“In these types of cases, the finger is more resistant than other organs and does not have much muscle tissue, which would be more difficult to repair. But even so, it remains a challenge to reimplant an amputated finger after 19 hours. I had to shorten it a bit; it will be shorter than his other fingers, but it will still be functional,” said the Turkish medical expert.
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Edited and reviewed by:
Pablo Gómez is a specialist in Turkey and has been editor-in-chief of Hispanatolia since 2011. He has been analysing current affairs and geopolitics in Turkey and the surrounding region since 2006.
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