A man in Hebei suffering from a strange leg ailment took matters into his own hands when the searing pain became too much, and sawed off his right leg using only a metal saw, a small fruit knife and a back-scratcher wrapped with a towel.
According to a recent report in the Shijiazhuang News translated by Chinasmack, Zheng Yanliang is a 47 year old man from Boading city, known in his town as being the ‘tough guy’. Last year, however, he began to experience bouts of intolerable pain in his abdomen that traveled to both of his legs. The pain was so bad, his legs were no longer able to stand, and he was ultimately diagnosed with massive arterial thrombosis/embolism in both legs. Angiograms showed that all of the arteries in his right leg were completely gone.
Doctors told the man that the disease was very rarely seen, and he wasn’t likely to live more than a month, at which point “[His wife] collapsed in tears: Over the span of a little over three months, Zheng Yanliang has been tormented by pain to the point of fuzzy consciousness, screaming so that his surrounding neighbors cannot sleep.”
Days later, after his wife had gone to bed, Zheng found a plastic fruit knife, a metal saw and a towel-wrapped backscratcher and began administering amputation on himself.
Over 20 minutes later, when [his wife] returned to the eastern bedroom after awaking from a nightmare, she was dumbstruck by the scene: Her husband’s right leg had been sawed off about 15 centimeters from the hip, and the metal saw used for the amputation had snapped into two from the excessive force, and on the table were 4 molars that had been bitten off. Fortunately, because of the thrombosis, there wasn’t much blood during the amputation.
Although the amputation stopped the pain in his right leg, the infection worsened in his left leg, and he began to experience the excruciating pain once again.
Zheng is now reaching out to his community to help him pay for an artificial limb, so that he can carry on with his life and take care of his family.
“Even in his dreams, he wants to get back up and support his wife, daughter, family. The pain of sawing off his leg was nothing to him and what worries him the most now is how his family can survive. He hopes there can be kind-hearted people who can give help, help him cure the strange disease he suffers from, and then install a prosthetic limb. That way, he’ll be able to take care of himself as well as do some simple manual labor and support his family.”
