Reconstructive microsurgery: far beyond vanity

When the exhausting chemotherapies were over and the surgeons decided to remove her left vocal chords, Mrs. Melbis Cañizares did not doubt of the fact that the cancer she was carrying for several months had won the first battle.

With the tumor extirpation, she had escaped from death; however, she started to pay a really high price: not eating for the rest of her life.

"I just used to eat a nutritional supplement that was deposited in my stomach through a catheter connected to my nose," asserted the 47 year old woman, who was not able to swallow her on saliva.

With this kind of food, her organism started to deteriorate and her physical appearance was so bad that she reached the weight of 39 kilos, "without clothes," mentioned Melbis, an inhabitant of Santa Marta, in the department of Magdalena.

As it was expected, she had a relapse; however, medical science offered her another surgical alternative: a radical resection of the tumor and a reconstructive surgery.

This meant taking one fragment of her small intestine (called jejunum), sectioning it, extracting it from the abdomen, and reconnecting it between the esophagus and the mouth; a very complex surgery, which gave Mrs. Melbi the opportunity to live again.

"It was incredible. Within a few days, she started to eat again as she used to before she developed the disease, and she not only gained her weight back, but is also capable of eating without any restriction. "She is living a very happy and normal life," affirms Johan, her husband, who highlights the skills of the group of experts in microsurgery, led by Doctor Raúl Sastre from Universidad Nacional de Colombia, which corrected the tumor deformity his wife had.

Mrs. Melbis is not the only patient. More than 365 oncologic patients have benefited from this sophisticated surgery technique, which has been used by plastic surgeons from Universidad Nacional de Colombia and experts from the National Cancer Institute to reconstruct tissues from the cranium, jaw, tongue, breasts and even genitals, among other parts of the body, for fourteen years.

But this is not all. With reconstructive microsurgery, experts from Universidad Nacional de Colombia have done incredible things such as reinplanting legs, arms and amputed hands in traffic or labor accidents (with industrial machines), violence actions (generally fights with sharp weapons such as machete), and even traumas resulting from the armed conflict (some patients were reintegrated into society from EPL).

Since transferring a tissue from one part of the body to other is difficult (with 95% possibility of success and 5% of failure), in the 26^th issue of Matices. Historias detrás de la investigación, we "rebuild" the steps of reconstructive surgery, a milestone in global medicine, which was introduced in Colombia by Universidad Nacional de Colombia and rescued when it was considered an expensive and non-effective effort in the country.