Louisville Magazine

AUG 2016

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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60 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 8.16 The patient: Nat Maysey, 18 The surgery: arm replantation In Nat Maysey's room at Uni- versity Hospital, only slivers of blue are visible behind the get-well cards — some colorful with cartoons, some inspirational with rolling script, some handmade from construction paper — and a purple Louisville City soccer jersey hiding the walls. A stiff, white brace encases his left arm, which he lifts occasionally. May- sey's mother, Alisa, sits at his bedside. "I would say there are probably about 115 (cards) now," she says. "I haven't counted. Probably 20 of them are from people we don't know." It's been just over a month since doctors reattached her son's arm. detached a few inches above the elbow. Better his arm than his whole body. He felt no pain — or can't remember feeling any — until after the surgery. Other workers reported Maysey run- ning from the site of the accident, yelling for help, but he has no memory of this. A volunteer firefighter yelled for a belt. Another worker handed the firefighter his two-inch-wide leather belt, which the firefighter tightened around the top of Maysey's wound. (e doctors would later call it a perfect tourniquet.) Maysey felt a slight sting — the only discomfort he recalls — and the bleeding ceased almost immediately. Other co-workers piled ice into a barrel while another extracted the 18-year-old's arm from the machine. "From what we're told, everything that happened after the accident, the people responding did everything right to make his replant possible," Alisa says. is includes calling for a helicopter to fly to Louisville instead of rushing to a ere's a spinning machine inside the manufacturing plant in Glasgow, Kentucky — components inside rotate clockwise, counterclock- wise. ere are pieces — Alisa, who's more talkative than her son, calls them "baskets" — Maysey manually manipu- lated as a temporary employee at work. On the morning of June 6 — 12 days after graduating high school, just his sixth day on the job — Maysey reached in to complete his task and got caught. e machine's gears closed around his fingers, twisted against his arm, pulled him in. "I just leaned back," Maysey says. He felt relief only when his arm

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