A young Northland boy had a 10-hour operation to remodel his hand on Saturday after it was ripped off in an accident at a Whangarei haulage company. The eight-year-old is in a stable condition in Auckland's Middlemore Hospital after surgery to re-attach and reshuffle three fingers that could be saved. The accidenthappened on Friday afternoon as he was sitting in a truck playing with a piece of rope at Haines House Haulage on Kioreroa Rd. Sergeant Nira Kingi of the Whangarei police said the boy had a length of rope wrapped around his hand, and had thrown the rest out the window. As the vehicle drove off, the rope caught, slicing through his right hand from below the base of the thumb to below the little finger. It wasn't a clean cut, said Auckland plastic surgeon Dr Murray Beagley, one of the team of surgeons who tackled the re-attachment job on Saturday. The boy's thumb and little finger had been too badly damaged to be re-attached, and the remaining fingers had been moved to make a "useful grip". Dr Beagley said the end bone of the boy's index finger had been sewn on to the thumb stump, skin from a finger filled the web between the thumb and finger, while the middle and ring fingers had been shortened and shifted toward the new thumb. The boy faces further surgery this week and over the coming months, and will not have full movement. "With these sort of cases you've just got to wing it for a while," said Dr Beagley. He was "somewhere between quietly confident and positive" the operation would be successful. The youngster was "pretty subdued" after the surgery and while he had looked at his hand, he was more interested in watching cartoons, the doctor said. Sergeant Kingi said while he didn't want to pre-empt the inquiry, "on the face of it, it appears to be a really unfortunate accident". "The police will investigate to ensure there was no negligence or otherwise on behalf of the driver." He said it was unclear at this stage what the rope caught on, or how thick it was. The police were told of the incident by the Department of Labour. Haines spokeswoman Val Ralph said the "unfortunate" accident involved an employee's son. The boy and his severed hand were flown by Northland Electricity rescue helicopter to Middlemore Hospital on Friday, where the hand was kept on ice until Saturday's marathon operation.
