Treatment for man who cut off festering leg
Print Edition
A CHINESE man has been admitted to hospital after it emerged that he amputated his festering leg himself.
Zheng Yanliang, a villager from north China’s Hebei Province, was taken to the No. 2 Hospital of Baoding, 150 kilometers northeast of provincial capital Shijiazhuang, on Friday for observation and treatment.
He was examined yesterday, and doctors are now working on treatment plans, said hospital director Ge Changqing.
In a case that has exposed shortcomings in China’s medical assistance mechanism, the 47-year-old cut off his right leg with a knife and hacksaw in April 2012.
The limb was almost necrotic — the cells and tissue had died — and local hospitals had either refused to take Zheng or demanded exorbitant fees.
“One hospital asked for 300,000 yuan (US$49,000) as a deposit, and we were told that follow-up treatment would cost more than 1 million yuan, far beyond our means,” Zheng’s wife, Shen Zhonghong, said.
Zheng had worked during slack times at a local brick kiln, earning 1,000 yuan a month.
He was diagnosed with arterial thrombosis of the lower limbs in early 2012, after aches in his buttocks and thighs left him hardly able to walk.
Without hospital treatment and told by doctors he would only live for three months, Zheng pinned his hopes on conservative therapy, resorting to shots to relieve his pain.
However, his condition deteriorated and his legs festered.
Zheng decided upon his drastic course of action when noticed maggots crawling out of his decaying flesh.
“I wouldn’t have allowed him to do it, and we’d quarreled over his idea,” Shen said.
Zheng said he did not feel much pain when cutting into the muscle, and little blood spilled out due to clotting. “But when the hacksaw went deeper to cut through bone, the pain was unbearable. I had to bite a bamboo chip bundled with toweling to endure it,” he said.
His remaining leg is now also in a terrible condition.
Zheng was left in such terrible circumstances because of health care loopholes.
Although he is covered under a rural cooperative medical system, he would have had to accept hospitalization and pay the costs up front in order to claim them back.
Since Zheng’s harrowing story was reported on Thursday by the Yanzhao Evening News, a local newspaper, donations of 50,000 yuan flowed in .
The No. 2 Hospital of Baoding said that all Zheng’s medical expenses will be waived.
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