By Michael Sheridan
From: Daily News
Photo: Mark MacEwen/Getty
A Swedish woman whose dog viciously mauled her face had her face reconstructed with the aide of several hundred leeches.
The attack occurred in August, when a mutt bit off a large chuck of the woman’s face from her upper lip to her eye, Skåne University Hospital in Malm” said in a statement.
The unidentified woman was rushed into surgery.
Relatives who were with the woman at the time of the attack managed to save the torn flesh and put it on ice, the hospital said.
In the operating room, much of the skin was reattached with the help of blood sucking leeches.
“The most important thing was to get blood into the torn off body part, which we managed to do within an hour of the start of the operation,” specialist Jens Larsson said in the statement, Sweden’s English-language news website, The Local, reported.
Surgeons used 358 leeches to force blood to flow through into the damaged skin. Some of the leeches were flown in from the United Kingdom after the hospital ran out of locally available ones, hospital officials said.
The woman will require more surgery to reconstruct her face, but suffered less damage than she may have otherwise without the leeches, the hospital said.
The dog was put down following the attack.
