A Chinese man named Xiao Wei who had his hand severed from his body in an industrial accident was able to save it after having it attached to his ankle for a month. Doctors said that they could not reattach the hand immediately because the man’s other injuries were so severe that they had to wait for them to recover before the hand was able to be reattached. In order to stop the hand from dying and wasting away, they were forced to attach it to his ankle whilst he recovered for a month from the other injuries.

Doctors have since reattached it to his stump of an arm and expect him to make a full recovery and regain complete control of it in the coming weeks. Science, right? Xiao Wei seems in remarkably good spirits about the whole thing, but I don’t know if I would be able to handle it if I’d been staring at my leg for a month in the hospital and every day I would be seeing my severed hand down there. That’s freaky.

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