A story about a nine year-old Florida girl nearly getting her hand ripped off by a shark is not really within National Zero’s preferred aggregation model given the lack of appeal of the cruelties of nature being inflicted on a child while she was supposed to be having fun at the beach, but it happened earlier this month. A week later came the better news, closer to but still outside of this site’s bailiwick: Leah Lendel’s right hand may make a full and complete recovery thanks to snap decisions by first responders to fly her to the right hospital, per a June 19th story at WFTS.
“That decision in the field to fly directly here was monumental because if they would’ve flown to another hospital and then had to go through all this and then were flown here, we’d have been well outside of the six hours that we like to revascularize a hand,” the story quotes Dr Alfred Hess, right above a pic of an X-ray of Leah’s hand after the attack. Fair warning on that one. It’s ugly.
“By flying directly here and having the great care that they had in the ER here and then getting them immediately to the OR, we were able to revascularize the hand within four and a half hours, so that is so much better for the tissues and the recovery and the future function of this hand,” the orthopedic surgeon continued, adding “Children have a much greater chance of gaining sensibility to their hands, so sensation and reinnervating the little muscles, the intrinsic muscles in the hand to get coordinated hand function, so we think that she should get all of that back, we’re hoping, and we want to see what her wrist does.” So it’s going in the right direction for her.