Chinese villager amputates own leg with fruit knife and saw

A Chinese villager with no medical background reportedly amputated his own leg using nothing but a fruit knife, a hacksaw and a wooden back scratcher after a mysterious infection took hold of one of his limbs and doctors gave him just a month to live. Until last year, Zheng Yanliang, 47 from a village in the northern province of Hebei, was known as the local “tough guy”, according to a report in the Shijiazhuang Daily newspaper. But early one morning in January 2012, Mr Zheng woke at his home in Dongzang to sharp pains in his belly and legs. He headed straight to the local surgery where GPs puzzled over his condition and administered a painkilling injection. Baffled by Mr Zheng’s complaint, they packed him off on a lonely and ultimately futile traipse through China’s chronically underfunded healthcare system, first in the nearby city of Baoding and then in Beijing. In the Chinese capital, hospital doctors diagnosed him with a rare and apparently incurable disease that had taken hold of his lower limbs for “an unknown reason,” the newspaper claimed.

They concluded Mr Zheng would be dead within the month, handed his family a hefty medical bill and sent the now penniless farmer back home to die. Three months on, however, and Mr Zheng was still very much alive albeit unable to sleep and surviving on a diet of prescription drugs. At night his ghoulish howls kept Dongzang awake, the newspaper claimed, and soon his condition deteriorated further: purple spots began to appear on his right leg and the skin turned black. Mr Zheng's impoverished family had no money to pay for surgery and when he implored the village doctor to amputate the limb he was rebuffed. “The doctor dared not do so,” his wife, Shen Zhonghong, told the Shijiazhuang Daily. It was then that a desperate Mr Zheng decided to take his fate, quite literally, into his own hands.

Read on! http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10369723/Chinese-villager-amputates-own-leg-with-fruit-knife-and-saw.html