Surgeons sew man's badly burned hand into his abdomen to help grow a new blood supply and save it from being amputated

Surgeons sew man's badly burned hand into his abdomen to help grow a new blood supply and save it from being amputated

We struggle for a way to explain the "sci-fi" surgery doctors were proposing to save her 87-year-old grandfather's badly burned hand.
He spent three weeks with his left hand surgically tucked under a pocket of tissue in his belly to give it time to heal and form a new blood supply.
After just three weeks, doctors cut his hand free of its temporary home and shaped some of the abdominal tissue and skin to cover it.
Surgeries like this — temporarily attaching one body part to another, or tucking it under skin — are by no means new, but they are uncommon. They are used on the battlefield, in trauma situations, and increasingly in research as a way to incubate lab-grown body parts from scaffold-like materials.
Without this procedure, there would be a high risk of infection and the tissue and tendons would rot away, leaving amputation as the last resort.
His hand was removed from the pouch with the skin of his abdomen successfully covering the back. Another procedure done a week later involved splicing skin from his left thigh and grafting it onto his palm.