The five-year-old boy whose step mother inflicted machete wounds on his arm and left it to rot has successfully undergone amputation surgery at the Cape Coast Teaching Hospital.
Doctors say Isaac Mensah’s condition is now stabilised and is responding to treatment after going through an hour “destructive surgery” Wednesday morning, our correspondent Thomas Cann reported.
“His chances of survival, going home and being fine and going back to school is almost 100 per cent… I don’t have any doubt that he’s going to be fine,” head of surgery at the Hospital, Martin Mornah told our correspondent after surgery.
Though many people feared the boy’s entire left arm was going to be amputated, surgeons only removed the hand (from the fingers to the wrist area). According to them, it has been done so that in future he could use “functional prosthesis”.
Dr. Mornah said a normal prosthesis will in the meantime be fixed on the hand, saying “of course we can make a prosthesis for him” but noted it will not be a functional one because that is “expensive”.
“I’m glad it is his left arm, not the right arm but you need both arms to be able to be very functional so this child has been hurt very badly,” Dr Mornah observed.
He said little Mensah was lucky that the machete did not cut his artery because that would have been disastrous.
“If he had severed an artery, he would have died; the bleeding would have been so much…this is an unnecessary problem the child has suffered.
3news.com on Tuesday broke the story of how 22-year-old woman was said to have accidentally inflicted cutlass wound on the left arm of the stepson about a month ago at Ahomfie, a village near Abura Dunkawa and left it untreated.
A week after, the wound started to deteriorate and gradually got out of hand resulting in the decomposition of the arm.The left forearm of the boy was rendered non-functional as doctors said the veins and cells in it had all died.
‘I didn’t intend to harm him’
The stepmother told our correspondent Thomas Cann at the hospital that Tuesday that she did not intend to cause injury to the stepson and that what happened was accidental.
She said Isaac Mensah defecated on their compound so she decided to punish him when they went to farm.
“I was then holding a cutlass so I decided to use the side of it to hit him, but he raised his arm to block it and unfortunately the cutlass cut him. We took him to a clinic and he was given injection and medication,” she said.
According to the woman, the man at the clinic who attended to the boy asked they bring him for review every three days for dressing of the wound. She claimed the said man also told her to use warm water to clean the wounds at home.
“When I tried to do it, he poured the water away. I decided to boil water again and I poured some on the wound. I later realised it was swollen but I continued to take him to the man who kept dressing it” she claimed.
Asked what caused the wound to deteriorate, she admitted the hot water she poured on the wound caused it to worsen.
Two men spotted the boy in town at Ahomfi on Monday, January 28 and became alarmed by rotten hand.
Shocked by the boy’s story, the two immediately reported the matter to the District Director of NCCE, Mrs Ellen Osei who also reported same to the police before taking him to the hospital the same day for medical examination.
By 3news.com|Ghana