Doctors: Outlook 'excellent' for man's reattached hand

Rene Campos remained remarkably composed when he saw his hand fly to the ground five feet away.

The 29-year-old Hempstead resident and a co-worker were on the job in Riverhead splitting logs around 2:30 p.m. on May 16 when Campos' right hand accidentally came in contact with the log-splitting machine. The hand was severed on the diagonal from the thumb up.

"I told him to pick up the hand," Campos, a native of El Salvador, said at a news conference at Stony Brook University Medical Center Friday.

While Campos, who said he felt little pain at the time, wrapped a shirt around his bleeding stump, the co-worker placed the hand in a cooler and Campos was rushed to Peconic Bay Medical Center. He was then transferred to Stony Brook - the only hospital on Long Island that can perform a hand re-attachment - two hours after the accident.

With only hours until the severed part would no longer remain viable enough to be attached, a team of five, including two surgeons, worked 14 hours into the early morning. They reattached 15 tendons, five bones, three arteries, three veins and 10 nerves.

The lead surgeon, Dr. Jason Ganz, a plastic surgeon who specializes in hand surgery, said he knew there was a good chance the surgery would work when he saw the fingers turn pink after the arteries were reattached.

"Thank God for the doctors," Campos said.

Less than a month later, Ganz called Campos' prognosis "excellent."

Ganz said hand amputations like Campos' are extremely rare - most involve loss of fingers - and a successful re-attachment is rarer still.

In 2005, Stony Brook successfully reattached both hands of Arsenio Matias, 49, of Wyandanch, whose hands were chopped off in an industrial accident.

Campos, who does not have private health insurance and is applying for Medicaid, is not likely to have any feeling in his hand for six months and faces a year of rehabilitation, Ganz said. And he probably won't have the same function he once had.

But, the surgeon said, "He will be able to use it for work. It will be a usable hand."

Asked if he planned to return to splitting wood, Campos was emphatic: "No," he said with a shake of his head.