A toddler is recovering from pioneering surgery to replace his thumb with a toe after his hand was mangled in a lawn- mower.

Baildon-born Sarah Petre-Mears, 25, feared three-year-old son Alex would be left permanently disabled after the horrific accident in her back garden.

But just two weeks after a gruelling eight-hour operation to graft his toe on to his hand, Alex is playing merrily with his Thomas the Tank Engine toys at his grandmother's home in Heaton, Bradford.

And although he cannot yet move his new thumb consciously, it wriggles and twists in his sleep.

"They've done such a wonderful job," said Mrs Petre-Mears.

"And Mum's looking after us now. She's doing all the dressing changes, as she's a nurse at St Luke's Hospital."

The nightmare began when Alex's dad, Edward, was cutting the grass at the family's former home on the Channel island of Sark last July.

Mrs Petre-Mears said: "I wasn't there but Alex was in the garden and said, 'Daddy, toilet quick'.

"So Edward rushed him inside the bathroom, as you do with children that age, but when he turned round, he'd gone back into the garden and was chasing a spider.

"The lawn mower wrenched off his thumb and turned his index finger almost into a corkscrew."

Alex was flown to Salisbury District Hospital, one of the country's leading centres for attaching severed limbs. But despite his dad's attempts to preserve the thumb by putting it in the freezer, surgeons were unable to save it and his index finger also had to be amputated.

Six months later, Alex returned to the Wiltshire hospital where pioneering surgery was used to attach his second toe to his hand, a technique never before used on someone so young.

"What we've done is given Alex a thumb which will look and function completely like a normal one," said consultant plastic surgeon Michael Cadier.

"It will grow with him and eventually you'll be hard pressed to notice the difference."

He added that efforts to literally squash Alex's toes together so there was no gap were so successful that even a nurse had difficulty working out where the toe had come from.

Alex is now looking forward to seeing his 17-month-old sister Siobhan and dad back in the West Indies, where they moved to last November, and the only reminder will be the splint and "snake and worm" shaped scars on his foot.

"He was quite traumatised at first," said Mrs Petre-Mears. "When we got him home he was frightened of Hoovers and other appliances and had quite bad nightmares.

"But the nurses were so good to him - that was one of the reasons we went back to Salisbury.

"Now he's back to his old self again."

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