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A carpenter's thumb started growing pubic hair after he accidentally sawed it off.

Peter Carter, from Auckland, New Zealand, was working on a piece of furniture at home when the saw kicked back and sliced off his left thumb.

His relatives rushed him to hospital, along with the severed finger they found on the ground.

Surgeons initially suggested replacing the thumb with one of his toes , but Mr Carter didn't meet the criteria – so they opted for a radical alternative that hadn't been performed in a long time.

The thumbless carpenter went into surgery the following day with no real idea about what was going to happen to him. When he woke up five hours later, he got a nasty surprise.

"I got the fright of my life when I woke up and I went to scratch my face but couldn't because my thumb was attached just to the left of my man products," he told the New Zealand Herald.

"It's one of those things your brain just can't comprehend. No one told me that's what was happening, so I asked the doctor what's going on."

He was told he'd been given a pedicled groin flap – a piece of skin had been cut from his groin and used to cover the top of what was left of his thumb. The thumb had then been sewn into place on his groin, which is the best place for a skin graft.

It remained there for the next month while the tissue grew back and attached itself to the thumb. Doctors then removed the stitches and all of a sudden Mr Carter had a functional 'half-thumb'.

However there were some very strange side effects.

While the digit has since healed, Mr Carter says it now grows pubic hair – a result of using his groin skin for the graft.

He said: "It's the gift that just keeps giving."