14 DAY TRIAL // Chinese doctors have been amazing people with bizarre surgeries involving people's extremities after building pincer-like hands for a factory worker with crushed palms and fingers and attacking one man's severed hand to his ankle until reattachment was possible. Now, they turned one student's toe into a finger.
22-year-old student, Ha Yuan, lost his left hand's third finger in a childhood accident and felt like he was discriminated from getting a well-paid job because of it. In these conditions, he decided to find a way to replace his missing body part and doctors suggested using his toe to recreate the missing finger.
Even if he wasn't experiencing any problems because of his missing finger, he didn't want people to discriminate him at the sight of his handicapped left hand so he agreed to the surgeons’ suggestion to amputate his toe and use it to create a fully-functioning extremity. Medical staff in Changsha, Hunan province amputated his second toe from Ha's left foot and attached it to his left hand.
“It's not easy to tell the difference if people are not looking at it closely. The only difference is the size of the nail,” Doctor Lu says, according to Daily Mail. The new “finger” will need a few months in order to heal and it will be fully-functioning.
Without the stigma he felt because of his missing finger, Hu Yuan said he was ready to start a new life where he wouldn't have to face people's pity looks. What determined him the most to accept the surgery was the fact that during a campus job fair he was refused by employers at the sight of his left hand, but that will not be an issue anymore.
A similar case was reported in Bristol, back in 2011, when a man had his big toe grafted onto his hand after losing his thumb. James Byrne severed his thumb while cutting wood, and the bleeding was so intense that doctors couldn't reattach his initial body part, choosing to make a more unusual surgery by using his big toe as a substitute.