How Come Sometimes The Body Rejects A Re-attached Limb?!
Question: One incident I know of is from the drummer of Def Lepperd. He lost his arm in a car accident and had his arm re-attached. His arm worked again but a short time after the doctors noticed his body was rejecting the limb and it got infected. He had to have the arm re-amputated.
Why does this happen sometimes? How does the body reject a re-attached body part?
Answers: One incident I know of is from the drummer of Def Lepperd. He lost his arm in a car accident and had his arm re-attached. His arm worked again but a short time after the doctors noticed his body was rejecting the limb and it got infected. He had to have the arm re-amputated.
Why does this happen sometimes? How does the body reject a re-attached body part?
We need to differentiate rejection and failure of re-attachment. True rejection is an immune response by the body to a material it deems as foreign - so if you get someone else's kidney, for example, you need to go on lifelong medication to suppress your bodies natural response to try to destroy that foreign tissue.
In the case of the Def Lepperd drummer you have failure of re-attachment. There are many small vessels in your limbs and sometimes, even with good surgical repair, they cannot heal adequately. If the limb also gets infected at the same time (while it doesn't have enough blood supply to fight the infection), there is very little chance that the limb can be salvaged, and amputation is necessary to prevent the infection from spreading to the rest of the body.
In most cases, failed attempts to re-attach a severed body part is because the injury is so traumatic that re-connecting the vascular system is impossible. In other cases the patient's health status (cardiovascular especially) plays a huge role in whether the re-attached part can be healed (it takes a lot of energy from the body to heal) Without adequate tissue perfusion (blood) the tissue cannot heal and that which is not perfused will die.
It is quite often the limb that rejects the body.