David Lange's family have expressed their gratitude for the surgeons who performed unusual surgery to keep the former prime minister alive.
 
Lange is resting comfortably in Auckland's Middlemore Hospital after his medical team used a nerve-blocking technique to remove his lower right leg without full anaesthesia.

He was admitted to hospital over two weeks ago for complications of diabetes.

Lange renowned for his wit, made light of the situation. "He popped up and said: 'Are you sure you've got the right leg?' And I stopped for a minute...of course I had the right leg...then he laughed," Dr Peter Vann said.

The former prime minister, who turns 63 tomorrow, is in end stage kidney failure. A lack of blood supply to his foot caused gangrene. This is a condition, surgeons say, that's more painful than childbirth. 

Normally a patient is fully anaesthetised before an amputation, but Lange's heart condition meant this couldn't happen. Vann hopes the operation will allow Lange to return home. He said Lange's fighting spirit could make the difference.

Lange's wife, Margaret Pope, said it's a great relief to the family that surgeons could operate after they had been told it wouldn't be possible.  Lange is now in a stable condition, his mood has lifted now that he's been relieved of the pain in his foot.

In 2002, it became known Lange was having chemotherapy for a deadly protein disorder, amyloidosis.