Boy’s Severed Foot Reattached in 9-Hour Surgery
It was 12:30 a.m. Wednesday when plastic surgeon J. Robert Wendt gave two frightened parents the good news: The delicate, 9-hour operation to reattach 21-month-old Matthew Souza’s severed foot had been a success.
Matthew’s foot is still “alive,” and, Wendt would say later, the Souzas’ little boy will walk again.
In the hallway outside the operating room at UC Irvine Medical Center in Orange, Julie and Eugene R. Souza began “screaming with joy,” Wendt said. “They were very happy.”
The Mission Viejo couple reportedly maintained a vigil Wednesday at their son’s bedside in the pediatric intensive care unit. However, they steadfastly declined to speak to reporters about the accident Tuesday afternoon in which a power mower cut off part of Matthew’s left foot.
Eugene Souza was cutting the lawn Tuesday afternoon when Matthew, a playful, towheaded youngster, apparently ran toward the rotary-blade mower and fell in its path, Orange County Fire Dept. Capt. Tom Pawloski said.
Pawloski and other officials said they could not understand how the rotary blade had cut the little boy’s foot so badly.
“We’re still having a hard time figuring out how his foot was severed like that. The dad stopped” the mower immediately, he said.
According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, 20,680 people were treated in U.S. emergency rooms in 1987 because of accidents involving rotary-blade, power lawn mowers.
Commission spokesman Jack Eden noted that those mowers, which contain a rectangular blade sharpened at either end, move faster and are more dangerous than reel-type lawn mowers.
The barrel-shaped reel mower’s several blades move only when the mower is pushed, Eden said. Using a reel mower is like cutting grass with scissors, whereas a rotary mower’s movement is more like “one big mashing action,” Eden said.
Concerned about injuries--especially fingers and toes severed by rotary-blade mowers--the commission in 1982 adopted regulations requiring that all mowers manufactured in the United States or imported here meet strict safety standards, Eden said.
Among those standards are a requirement that a rotary machine’s blade must stop “in 3 seconds” when it is not being operated, he said.
Also, Eden said, mowers must pass a test in which a rubber mold about the size of an adult foot is pushed beneath the metal housing surrounding the rotary blade. If the mold comes in contact with the sharp rotating blade, the mower fails the test and cannot now be marketed in this country.
Orange County Sheriff’s Lt. Richard J. Olson described the mower that maimed Matthew as a 5-horsepower, rotary-blade Kubota but said he did not know what year the machine was made.
Eden said he believes it was probably a pre-1982 machine. If someone was pushing one of the post-1982 rotary mowers “and a child ran out, all (the operator) would have to do is take his hands off the back and the blade would have stopped in 3 seconds,” Eden said.
One county official recalled Wednesday how easy it was to run into trouble with a pre-1982 rotary-blade lawn mower. About 8 years ago, County Fire Department Capt. Hank Raymond said, he cut his foot slightly with such a mower.
“I was just mowing my lawn,” he said, “and I was taking the side basket off (to empty it of grass), and I stuck my foot in there. . . . I was trying to hurry and it just clipped my tennis shoe and cut the tip of my toe. I just put a Band-Aid on it.”
By contrast, Matthew Souza’s accident was a family’s nightmare.
Christine Hamilton, one of the Souza’s next-door neighbors on the Mission Viejo cul-de-sac Lorente, said she was home about 1:30 p.m. Tuesday when Julie Souza “came to my door hollering and screaming, ‘Christine, come help me.’ ”
Eugene Souza and another neighbor, Judy Rivera, “had already taken the baby into the bathroom, and Judy was calling 911,” Hamilton said.
She said Julie Souza had recovered part of her son’s foot and was talking to paramedics about preserving the tissue by keeping it cool and moist.
After an emergency helicopter took Matthew to UCI Medical Center, Hamilton’s husband drove the distraught Souzas to the hospital and stayed with them until Julie Souza’s relatives came.
“Everything happened so quickly,” Hamilton said. “You do things and then you collapse later. It was just a tragic thing. We (all the neighbors) love the little guy, and we’re all praying for him.”
At the medical center, surgeons Wendt and Robert C. Bledsoe described the difficult operation to reattach about a 2 1/2-inch front segment of Matthew’s foot.
It took about 5 hours to isolate the arteries, veins, nerves and bones that they would reattach, to clean the area and remove injured tissue, then hook up tiny blood vessels with the help of a microscope, Wendt said.
Surgeons at first were not optimistic. Wendt said: “This was a combination of a sharp cut and a tearing injury. . . . The parents were notified that maybe it wouldn’t work.”
But the surgical team was nearly as excited as the Souzas as the surgery went well. “It’s kind of dramatic to look when the foot’s pure white and then hook up one of the arteries and it looks pink,” Wendt said.
Wendt said he expected Matthew would remain in the hospital at least a week and would have to wear a splint stretching to his thigh for at least a month. After that, though, “It will heal and have sensation, and it will function as a foot,” he said. “He will be able to bear weight on it.”
Wendt also said he expected that the foot would grow. But because surgeons removed a portion of the foot--one of several tarsal bones--the foot will always be perhaps an inch shorter than his right foot, Wendt said.
