Word: armfuls
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...shark was still thrashing on the beach. Jared Klein, a National Park Service ranger, wondered whether the arm was in the water or in the shark's mouth. At a paramedic's suggestion, he took his expandable baton and pried apart the bull shark's jaws. There it was. But, says Klein, "the arm was too far in the mouth to remove it," particularly with the shark still in violent convulsion. He asked the crowd to step back and shot the shark four times in the head. Then he opened its mouth with the baton, while Tony Thomas, a lifeguard...
...thus oxygen--for 30 min. The medics put him on a gurney and took him down in an elevator four floors to Trauma Room 9, continuing CPR all the way. As doctors, nurses, aides and technicians hunched over the lifeless boy, nurse Dawn Colbert inserted an IV into his arm and began a rapid infusion of O-negative blood, the universal-donor type. Within 15 minutes, Colbert pumped nearly 1.5 liters of warmed blood into Jessie, about half the normal volume for an 80-lb. boy. Jessie began to bleed. But his heart still wasn't beating...
...bone, three nerves, one artery, three veins and three muscle groups had to be reattached if Jessie was to recover with some semblance of normal use of his arm. While De Campos prepared the stump, Rogers marked the corresponding veins, arteries and nerves with sutures on the severed arm. First, De Campos shortened the arm even more, taking away about an inch of bone so that the stump would hold a plate to keep the limb in place. She clamped the bones together--two screws in the stump, two at the overlap and two more in the arm...
That done, Rogers connected the muscle tissue. Wearing magnifying goggles, he began reattaching major nerve endings, which are just slightly thicker than an eyelash. Next, veins and arteries were reconnected. Rogers had to take some veins from Jessie's leg to replace damaged vessels in the arm. Finally, Rogers released the clamps and blood began to flow back into the arm, which he describes as "absolutely white" and very cold. Arteries and veins starved for blood for so long went into spasms as new liquid began to flow. Antispasmodics were administered, and team members massaged the arm...
Five minutes, 10, 15. No response in the arm. "We were nursing this for about 30 minutes," Rogers says. "Then, all of a sudden, all the little cuts in his forearm started to bleed, and we could hear pulses in the arteries." The trickiest part, the doctors say, was stitching the skin back. "It was like putting a jigsaw puzzle together," says De Campos. After 12 hours in surgery, they wheeled him into the recovery room. They could only wait and see if he would survive...