KEY POINTS:
Neville Kennedy looks at the x-ray of his bandaged left wrist, wriggles his swollen thumb and points to the bits he says are "mince".
His wife Julie jokes that at least he came up with a novel way of wriggling out of wedding anniversary celebrations - Tuesday, the day a steel frame sliced through his wrist, was the Invercargill couple's 31st anniversary.
The parents of four had a posh dinner planned and tickets to the theatre. But at lunchtime, while 51-year-old Kennedy was using a crane to lift a 12m steel frame in the workshop of E-Type Engineering, something slipped and the frame fell, smashing through veins, arteries, bones and muscle.
"I remember picking up my hand and thinking, 'Oh, that's not so good'," he said yesterday.
The accident, he said, was just one of those things. But he and Julie think his plastic surgeon, Sally Langley, worked a medical miracle that night.
By the time he arrived at Christchurch Hospital his hand had been dangling by a thread for almost eight hours. Six hours without blood flow was usually the upper limit, Langley said, but a team of 20 swung into action at 7pm.
Getting blood back into the hand was all-important. They knew they might have to use a shunt - a small pipe to connect pieces of artery - or shorten the bones so that the artery could stretch between them.
But when the team found Kennedy's radial artery and trimmed it they decided it might just work. "We sewed it together quickly... It flowed, then we slowed down a bit. We were a bit lucky, we got it joined up and flowing without any problems."
They worked until 2am, inserting a 10cm plate into the radius bone, and four stainless steel pins along each finger. Those wires were left poking up from Kennedy's knuckles and would be pulled out in about eight weeks, Langley said. The plates and pins would keep the bones still.
"The prognosis... is very good. How good depends on how good the nerve recovery is," she said. "Nerves have been quite squashed... If they perk up and give good feeling, the hand will be a very good hand. If the nerves don't recover we'll have to work out whether we do some further nerve surgery - or just put up with a hand that has poor sensation."
Kennedy will be in hospital until at least next week, and faces months of wearing a wrist support and therapy.
Langley's name for what happened to Kennedy is a little more technical than "mince": he suffered compound fracture dislocation of the distal carpal row. About a dozen of the small bones in his wrist and hand were broken.
The Kennedys think the world of her. But Langley also wants to acknowledge her registrar, Terry Creagh, and orthopaedic surgeon Andrew Vincent.
