Ohio woman accidentally amputates her left arm

By Alex Stuckey

Columbus Dispatch

COLUMBUS

Pat Marvin knows her way around a miter saw.

Usually.

The 63-year-old grandmother was building a handrail for the deck on her Dakota Avenue house in Franklinton near Columbus on Tuesday morning when something went terribly wrong.

Marvin was making the final cuts to a piece of wood when she slipped. The blade sliced through her left arm, just above the wrist.

“I didn’t realize what happened, but I knew something happened, and then I saw my hand lying on the ground,” Marvin said Thursday at Riverside Methodist Hospital.

Then she felt the pain.

Her sweatshirt had gotten wrapped up in the blade and wound around her arm, creating a tourniquet of sorts and cutting off the bleeding.

She ran up the basement steps and out the front door, screaming for help.

“It felt like hours I was out on that porch,” Marvin said. “Then a man I don’t know came walking down the street and called an ambulance.”

A paramedic found the hand, and Marvin was rushed to Riverside, where Dr. Lawrence Lubbers and a team reattached each vein, bone, nerve and tendon — 32 in all — during an eight-hour surgery.

Dr. Lubbers, a hand surgeon, used steel rods to hold it all together.

“I’m like the bionic woman,” Marvin said.

Because the blade shattered some of her bone, Dr. Lubbers had to smooth them. That took about an inch off of her arm length.

Her family is ecstatic that she is fine.

“She’s the glue that holds our family together,” said daughter Angie Marvin, who flew from Dallas after her two brothers called. “As long as she’s alive, I’m OK with that.”

Son Donald Marvin lives around the corner and had driven past his mother’s house Tuesday when he saw the ambulance.

“It was like an out-of-body experience,” he said. “When I saw they were going to mom’s, I lost it on the sidewalk. I was so worried.”

His mother sat in her hospital bed beaming at the people around her and wiggling her fingers beneath the thick bandages.

“You just have to go with what God gives us,” Pat Marvin said. “I can’t change it.”

Dr. Lubbers said Riverside doctors see numerous saw injuries every week. Amputated limbs, he said, are rare.

“We get a lot of amputated thumbs and fingers from saws, but not entire arms,” he said.

Dr. Lubbers said his patient will need two years of physical therapy.