WARNING, GRAPHIC CONTENT: A scientist scalped by an industrial machine while working in a converted paper mill factory has spoken of her ordeal
A scientist who suffered a horrific scalping injury from an industrial machine has recounted the harrowing moment she walked into her lab clutching her own scalp.
Dr Pia Winberg endured a nightmare scenario when her hair became caught in a high-powered drive shaft while working in a converted paper mill factory. The 55 year old had her scalp torn clean from her skull in the appalling accident.
Despite losing substantial amounts of blood, Pia succeeded in extricating herself from the machinery, retrieved her detached scalp and made her way 200 metres to a neighbouring laboratory to request a colleague summon an ambulance. The scientist has revealed how the devastating day played out.
“I was wearing my factory cap, protective eyewear and hearing protection,” Pia, from Narrawallee, Australia, told creatorzine.com. “I assumed that the small ball grip at the end of the valve handle unthreaded, and rolled under the machine. Why else I would have been on my knees with my head just above floor level?
“That’s where I found myself. The next memory was a just sense of frustration, as I tried to work out why my hair felt like it was tangled in two directions in something. I brought my hands down in front of me.”, reports the Daily Star.
“In confusion, I wondered why my hands were completely covered in red – that was when my memory stopped again. I must have managed to extract my hair, remove my scalp and its hair from the machine, and walked, holding it, 200 metres to the lab building. I opened the door and said my colleague Rachel’s name, after which my memory stops.”
In February 2019, the scientist was developing seaweed-based gels designed to restore damaged tissue and improve wound recovery. The accident happened at a pilot facility she’d set up in a disused 1950s paper mill in New South Wales.
Rachel described Pia as eerily composed despite being soaked in blood. Pia recalled: “I turned and walked down the corridor to my office chair. Rachel ran after me and it was then that she could see my skull sticking out of the top of my head, and my scalp and mobile phone in my hands in my lap. She understood then that it was me who had had the accident and she acted fast.”
Four ambulances arrived within 10 minutes, followed by a rescue helicopter. Paramedics worked for hours attempting to stabilise her blood pressure before she could be airlifted to Sydney’s St George Hospital.
Medical staff attempted to reattach her scalp during six hours of emergency operations, but the blood vessels had sustained excessive damage. Instead, surgeons carried out a split-skin graft utilising skin removed from her thigh, fastening it directly to her skull while vacuum pressure encouraged the tissue to fuse.
Without viable tissue, her skull bone would have perished. Yet, in a remarkable twist, the scientist reckons her own seaweed-based research contributed significantly to her recovery.
Pia revealed: “When the dressings could be removed a week later, I went straight into using my seaweed gel moisturiser across the whole mesh graft site, and it healed so well that I say I had baby skin across my head and not a single scar from the mesh skin pattern.
“Not that having a baby’s bottom effect across my head was ideal, but it was still amazing. I kept using the cream, until a year later, because skin remodelling takes as long as that after trauma.”
Throughout the subsequent year, she underwent six further reconstructive procedures as doctors progressively expanded remaining scalp tissue across her skull using inflatable expanders topped up weekly with saline solution.
Pia explained: “They approached this by implanting expander bags under the side patch of hair and scalp tissue that remained on one side. These bags were expanded to stretch the scalp with hair on it slowly, by injecting 10ml of saline each week.
“After the bag was filled to a litre of water and I had a giant hair balloon on the side of my head, a fourth surgery could remove the balloon, detach 90% of the baby skin graft tissue, and extend the stretched, real, scalp tissue with hair over to the other side of my skull to reattach once again.
“After this, another two surgeries tidied it up, and today there is just one four centimetre patch of baby skin, thigh graft tissue on my skull. The rest is extended true scalp with my own hair, thinned a bit, but with feeling and better thickness than thigh skin, which was thin and with no nerves or sensation.”
Her present research now focuses on SXRG84, a seaweed-based gel that appears to mimic molecules involved in human tissue repair, hydration and collagen production.
Pia explained: “Before the accident, I thought of the scalp mainly as the place that held hair. After losing mine, I learned that the scalp is far more than that. It’s a living, sensory, vascular organ wrapped over the skull, thick, richly innervated, full of hair follicles, blood vessels, glands and connective tissue.
“The scalp helps protect the skull and brain, regulates heat, senses touch and temperature, and anchor the hair that shields us from sun, cold and environmental exposure. Losing my scalp changed more than my appearance. I experienced vertigo and a strange disconnection from the top of my own head.
“Hair movement activates nerve endings around the follicle, making hair-covered skin sensitive to light touch, brushing, air movement and subtle environmental contact. I had to relearn touch, pressure and position across my skull.
“The map of my head had been redrawn. I could feel my brain learning where I was again. That experience changed the way I understood skin.”
Scientists at PhycoHealth, the company Pia founded, are investigating whether the marine gel could help burns victims, chronic wounds and tissue harmed by chemotherapy.
Pia continued: “Skin is not wrapping paper, it’s an organ of sensation, immunity, temperature control, communication and repair. The scalp, in particular, is a remarkable interface between the brain and the outside world. It tells us about pressure, wind, warmth, danger, touch and even the subtle presence of our body in space.
“I became, unwillingly, a patient inside the very clinical world I was trying to help and experiencing the challenge from the frontline. I saw the brilliance of surgeons and emergency clinicians, but also the limits of what medicine currently has available when large areas of complex tissue are lost.
“A split-skin graft can save life and cover bone, but it does not replace full scalp tissue, hair follicles, thickness, sensation, glands, elasticity or the original sensory map of the body. That’s why our research now matters to me in a completely different way.
“We’re investigating how these marine glycans can support skin repair, collagen protection, inflammation control, microbiome balance and even 3D-printed full-thickness skin models. What began as ecological science, cultivating seaweed to transform waste nutrients into valuable biology, became deeply personal.
“I now understand skin as one of the most intelligent organs of the body. And I understand healing not only as closing a wound, but as restoring structure, sensation, identity and connection to the world.”
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