Surgeons in China have carried out a reconstructive procedure, temporarily grafting a woman’s severed ear onto her foot and ‘letting it survive’ for months before reattaching it to her head.
The procedure was performed by a microsurgery team at Jinan’s Shandong Provincial Hospital after the patient suffered a devastating factory accident in which her hair became trapped in machinery during her shift.
According to the hospital, the heavy equipment tore away large portions of skin from her scalp and neck, completely severing her ear along with the surrounding tissue.
The woman was rushed to hospital with life-threatening injuries, where a medical team, led by Qiu Shenqiang, deputy director of the hospital’s microsurgery unit, determined that conventional reattachment was impossible due to the severity of the injuries.
The South China Morning Post reported that the surgeons initially attempted standard scalp reconstruction, but extensive vascular damage meant that blood flow could not be restored reliably enough to reattach the ear immediately.
Qiu revealed that the woman’s scalp, neck and facial skin were ‘split into multiple fragments’, while her ear was ‘completely severed along with the scalp’.
With no prior example to follow, the medical team decided on an unconventional solution, grafting the ear onto the top of her foot.
Heterotopic grafting is commonly used in microsurgery but rarely applied to ear reattachment.
The team reportedly chose the foot because its arteries and veins closely match those in the ear. Meanwhile, the thin skin and soft tissue would require minimal reshaping later.
The initial grafting procedure took around 10 hours. The medics explained that one of the procedure’s biggest technical challenges was reconnecting extremely fine blood vessels, which measure between 0.2 and 0.3 millimetres in diameter.
Several days later, the team encountered another complication, as venous reflux caused the ear to darken, jeopardising tissue survival. To resolve it, they turned to therapeutic phlebotomy, the deliberate removal of blood. The process required close to 500 individual interventions over five days to maintain circulation.
While the ear was being preserved on the foot, surgeons worked to reconstruct the patient’s scalp and neck using skin grafts taken from her abdomen. Over the following months, the swelling subsided, healing progressed, and the blood supply stabilised.
In October, the team reattached the ear to its original position. The six-hour surgery was the first documented full reattachment of this kind.
Qiu revealed that her facial structure and tissue function have largely recovered. The woman will require a small number of additional procedures, including eyebrow restoration and cosmetic scar reduction on the foot.
