Microsurgery: Sewing Blood Vessels and Nerves Back Together :: Health Medicine

Microsurgery Sewing Blood Vessels and Nerves Back Together A man came into the emergency ward at one oclock. His thumb came in anhour later. The surgeons job get them back in concert.The successful re-attaching of fingers to hand requires long hours ofpainstaking work in microsurgery. In the run room , the surgeondoesnt stand, but sits in a chair that supports her body. Her arm iscradled by a pillow. Scalpels are present as are other standardised surgicaltools, but the suture threads are al roughly invisible, the needle thinnerthan a human hair. And all the surgical activity revolves around themost important instument, the microscope.The surgeon will spend the next few hours looking through the microscopeat broken blood vessels and boldnesss and sewing them back together again.The needles are so thin that they have to be held with needlenosedjewellers forceps and will sew together nerves that are as wide as thethickness of a penny. To make such a stitch, the surgeons hands willm ove no more than the width of the folded side of a piece of paper seenend onImagine trying to sew two pieces of spaghetti together and youll havesome idea of what microsurgery involves.Twenty-five years ago, this mans thumb would have been lost. But in the1960s, surgeons began apply microscopes to sew what previously had beenalmost invisible blood vessels and nerves in limbs. Their sewingtechnique had been developed on large blood vessels over a half centuryearlier but could not be used in microsurgery until the needles andsutures became small enough. The surgical technique, still widely usedtoday, had taken the frustrative unreliability out of sewing slippery,round-ended blood vessels by ingeniously turning them into triangles. Todo this, a cut end of a blood vessel was sewed at three equidistantpoints and pulled slightly apart to give an anchored, triangular shape.This now lent itself to easier, more dependable stitching and paved theway for microsurgery where as many as twenty stitches will have to be madein a blood vessel three millimetres thick. The needle used for this pratbe just 70 millimetres wide, only ten times the width of a human bloodcell.All this technology is focused on get body parts back together againsuccessfully. The more blood vessels reattached, the better the survivalchances for a toe or a finger. The finer the nerve resection, the betterthe feeling in a damaged part of the face, or control in a previouslyuseless arm. But the wounded and break up body part must be treated