Pioneering transplant surgeon Pedro Cavadas leaves public health service
Friday, August 9, 2019 @ 8:21 PM
’SUPER-SURGEON’ Pedro Cavadas is no longer working for the public health service, having taken a job at a private clinic in Valencia.
Formerly based at the hospital in Manises – the nearest town to Valencia airport – which he left in mid-July, Dr Cavadas has made international headlines in his unusual career as a plastic and reconstructive surgeon.
Hailed as a ‘transplant genius’, Cavadas shot to national fame in 2004 when he managed to keep a 25-year-old patient’s severed arm ‘alive’ by connecting the veins and arteries in it to the man’s own upper thigh for nine days, before reimplanting the limb.
Later, in 2006, at Valencia’s La Fe hospital – one of the most high-tech and pioneering in the country – Dr Cavadas transplanted two hands and an arm below the elbow on a woman from Castellón (second picture) who had lost them 28 years previously in an explosion, a procedure which had only ever been carried out six times in history, in France, Austria and China.
And 10 years ago, he successfully completed out the first-ever face transplant in Spain, which was then only the eighth in the world, on a 43-year-old Canary Islander who had been left totally disfigured by an aggressive form of cancer.
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