Boy with reattached legs joins Russian army

A 20-year-old boy from Siberia has made it into the Russian army despite almost losing his legs in a railway accident, Lifenews reports.

Sasha Ustyuzhanin from a Siberian town of Leninsk-Kuznetsk had always dreamt of being one day recruited in the Russian Army, but an accident he was involved in seven years ago almost completely out any future military career.

He was travelling on a cargo-train, when he fell down between freight wagons and right onto the railway. Doctors say he was lucky to have lived, but the accident still cost him his two legs.

Yet the boy didn’t plan to put up with it and insisted on having his legs reattached. The surgery went on for 5 hours, after which he had to spend almost a year in hospital.

“Sasha lost some six liters of blood during surgery, and we had to keep it and pour it inside him again. Several times his blood pressure dropped to zero,” recalls academician Leonid Afanasiev, who led the surgery.

“I put together all his bones, tendons, blood vessels and nerves. This was the first and the only successful operation in the whole world of that kind to date.”

And now, seven years later, Sasha successfully passed medical commission at his local recruitment office. Curiously enough, not all of his friends did the same:

“Some of my friends failed the commission due to flatfoot, bad eyesight or something else, but I passed it,” Sasha said with pride.