Amputation by text message

IT HAS BEEN revealed that a British volunteer surgeon in the 'Democratic Republic' of Congo managed to carry out a complex shoulder amputation using only a scalpel and instructions sent via text message from a colleague on holiday in the Azores.

Both the Guardian and Daily Wail report that 52-year-old do-gooder, David Knott, formerly a general and vascular surgeon at Chelsea and Westminster hospital and now a ruggedly-attractive, khaki-clad (we'd like to imagine) hero working for Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), saved the life of a badly-injured 16-year-old in the town of Rutshuru back in October.

But that’s where the reports diverge somewhat. The Grauniad claims the youth’s arm had been badly damaged, "either in an accident or as a result of the fighting between Congolese and rebel troops", whereas the Wail insists he "had been bitten by a hippo".

Aha. Well, we’ll let you, our esteemed readers, decide which version you like best. We'd like to think he was chased into the hippo's maw by the rebels but then we watch far too much TV.

Knott realised that, with the boy’s arm badly infected and gangrenous, he had little choice but to amputate or risk letting him die. "Even then I had to think long and hard about whether it was right to leave a young boy with only one arm in the middle of this fighting", Knott told the Guardian.

The particular amputation Knott had to perform, requiring the removal of the collar bone and shoulder blade, was one he had never attempted before, not even in Britain under sterile conditions, let alone in a makeshift, bare bones operating theatre.

So Knott attempted to get hold of a colleague, Meirion Thomas, who he knew had performed the procedure before, only to find Professor Thomas indisposed in the Azores. But the good professor did manage to put down his Pina Colada long enough to send Knott two text messages explaining the whole procedure step by step, followed up with an encouraging 'Easy!' and 'Good luck'.

We can only assume the messages looked something like: uz scalpel 2 cut off sholder blade. rm collarbone 2. sew it ll ^. Bware of hippos n rebel gunmen. havN gr8 tym n azores, bet UW u wr hre. Lol.

The surgery, which would have been risky, even back in Blighty, was performed under the tightest of conditions. "We only had one pint of blood, one scalpel, one pair of forceps and I wasn't sure if the anaesthetic was strong enough", said Knott.

Luckily, the amputation was a success and the 16-year-old made a good recovery. "God works in mysterious ways - and this time he was working via text message", Knott concluded. µ

L'Inqs
The Guardian
The Daily Wail