Medicine is amazing but sometimes it can look like the darkest corners of Stephen King’s brain. This is exactly the case: Chinese doctors saved a man’s severed hand by attaching it to his ankle, creating some impossible anatomy in the process.
Xiao Wei — an industrial worker in Changde, China — suffered a dramatic accident in which his hand was severed. It took seven hours to get him to the hospital along with his hand, recovered by his co-workers. Doctors thought it would be impossible to reattach the hand at the time, so they did what they thought it was the best option: attach it to the ankle so it could survive.
It works. After spending an entire month with his hand living attached to his ankle while his injured healed, the doctors successfully re-attached the hand to his arm.
It may have looked horrible for a month, but Wei is now a happy man with two functional hands.