A woman in Denmark has undergone complex surgery to reattach her scalp after it was completely torn off by a column drill, along with her eyebrows and all her hair.
The woman in her mid-60s was using a column drill – a benchtop tool used to create holes in metal panels and other materials – to renovate a tractor, when her hair became tangled in the rapidly rotating drill bit.
This resulted in her entire scalp being yanked off, leaving a thin layer of bleeding connective tissue covering her skull, and her upper left ear dangling by a thread.
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The woman called an ambulance and the attending paramedics packed her scalp in a plastic bag inside a bag of cold water and ice and rushed her to Odense University Hospital in southern Denmark.
Plastic surgeons removed the scalp from the ice and cut the hair short. They placed the scalp back on the woman’s head while she was anaesthetised and reconnected three of the severed blood vessels to return blood flow to her scalp. Next, they stitched her skin back together and sewed her upper ear back on, all within 5 hours of the accident.
“The size of the little blood vessels they had to connect back up would have only been 1 or 2 millimetres in diameter,” says , president of the Australian Society of Plastic Surgeons.
Reconnecting blood vessels like these requires microsurgical instruments to make stitches that are each a quarter of the thickness of a human hair around the circumference of each vessel, says Dean. “The needles are very tiny and you have to do it with a microscope and make sure your hands and arms are nicely positioned so you don’t wobble,” she says.
Over time, additional blood vessels should naturally grow back into the woman’s scalp from the rest of her head, says Dean.
She says she has seen some cases of scalps being partially ripped off – “usually from ponytails getting caught in machinery” – but has never seen a full scalp torn off before.
at Odense University Hospital and the other surgeons involved in the case believe it may be the largest scalp reattachment ever performed.
Since the surgery, the woman has recovered well. Her hair is growing back, she is regaining feeling in her scalp and she can partially lift her eyebrows again. At her five-month check-up, she told her surgeons that she was pleased with the outcome and was “slowly getting better week by week”.
“Often with these things, you get part of the scalp not surviving and having to do further reconstructive work, but the results of this case are very good,” says Dean.
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