It's often trickier to connect veins, which carry blood back to the heart, than arteries, which carry blood from the heart. So before grafted tissue gets new vein growth, it can become congested with blood. Sometimes surgery can fix the problem, but if it can't, the graft might fail.
Enter the leech. Not only does it suck out excess blood, but its saliva contains a powerful blood thinner. So even after it fills up and drops off, bleeding continues.
Douglas Chepeha, an ear, nose and throat surgeon at the University of Michigan, treats two or three patients a year with leeches after rebuilding faces or mouths decimated by cancer.
Typically, leeches are used one at a time and replaced as they drop off — usually every 20 minutes — for 24 to 48 hours, then intermittently for a few days afterward, Chepeha says.
"I've never had anybody refuse," Chepeha says. "They've come in with a serious cancer, they've had part of a critical organ removed, they want to get better. You say to them: 'I think this could help.' People have been amazingly stoic about it."
Normally pretty squeamish, Alyssa Kieff, 22, of Marrero, La., tolerated five days of leech therapy in April. Kieff's beagle had snapped at her and tore off her right upper eyelid, which was reattached microsurgically by Kamran Khoobehi, a Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center plastic surgeon.
