Surgeons reattach 11-year-old’s arm at the shoulder, in medical first for Greece

An 11-year-old boy whose arm had been severed at the shoulder was recovering at Aghia Sofia Children’s Hospital in Attica on Monday after a team of surgeons from three different Attica hospitals performed the first successful surgery to reattach a limb at shoulder height ever carried out on a child in Greece. The boy was reported to be in a serious but stable condition.

According to a hospital announcement, the team was put together after the hospital received a call that the patient was being airlifted from the island of Zakynthos following a complete amputation of his left arm.
Specialist surgeons were brought in from Laiko General Hospital in Athens (Christos Klonaris and Natasa Hasemaki, vascular surgery), the KAT General Hospital (Philippos Giannoulis, Hand and Upper Arm Surgery) while the rest of the team came from Aghia Sofia children’s hospital (Ioannis Anastasopoulos, Orthopaedics, Panagiotis Krallis, Orthopaedics, Eleftherios Kosmas, Orthopaedics, Varvara Aslanidou, Anaesthesiology, Philippia Aroni, Anaesthesiology, Marilena Prapa, intensive care paediatrics, Vasiliki Dimitropoulou, IC paediatrics, Sotirios Konstantopoulos, IC paediatrics).

The patient arrived at the hospital on Sunday at 16:30, together with the severed limb, and was taken into surgery at 17:00. The surgery was completed successfully at 2:00 on Monday.

“We noted that this is the first successful reattachment of a limb at shoulder height on a child in Greece. The patient is being treated in a stable condition in our hospital ICU,” the announcement said.

Source: amna.gr