About this user
Left partial hand amputee due to construction accident with table saw. My left wrist got chewed up and the ring finger and little fingers got mangled by the saw. The entire little finger was disarticulated, and the ring finger was cut off almost completely, leaving a one inch stump.
I've gotten a number of inquiries on how I recovered from the accident that resulted in the partial amputation of my left hand. If you're interested, read on:
ACCIDENT AND IMMEDIATE MEDICAL CARE:
I was involved in a construction accident that mangled my left hand and wrist pretty badly. Apparently I lost focus on the carpentry project I was involved with and tangled with the table saw. It was a Sunday afternoon about 5PM. The outer aspect of my left wrist was gouged by the table saw I was using. The accident also chewed up my last two fingers and gouged the outer aspect of the palm in a couple places. The fingers were not completely severed, apparently still hanging on by nerves and a little skin. It was quite a bloody mess. I found a towel and a spare computer electrical cord and tied it up the best I could. I had a friend bring me to the Emergency Room, I was holding the hand up, trying to slow the bleeding.
The ER staff seemed more calm about the situation than I thought appropriate, but never having been through something like this I had no idea what to expect. I was taken into an exam room, and my shirt was cut off me, and they started to cut my pants off, but realized I could take them off, so stopped after making a 2" cut. Initial wound treatment was done, and I was sent off to Radiology. I waited maybe 10 minutes to get in for the X-rays, where they took three shots, showing both palm-up and palm down views in addition to a view from the outer side of the hand/wrist. From there I was wheeled into a hallway and left for what seemed like 45 minutes, until finally the hand surgeon on call showed up. He stated that he reviewed the films and that he'd get me fixed up soon, they're getting the Operating Room ready.
I was wheeled into the OR probably about 7:30PM, roughly 2-1/2 hours after my accident. I was sedated, and drifted off.
I woke up in the recovery room around 9PM with my hand all bandaged up and hooked up to a big tube of some kind. I was visited by the hand surgeon who said he did a 'ray amputation' of the little finger, pieced back together the left ring finger as well as possible, and cleaned out the damaged area of the wrist and applied a vacuum sponge device to it. I thought that the ray amputation of the little finger would have removed the metacarpel for that finger from the palm portion of the hand also, but that remained. The finger was actually disarticulated at the metacarpo-phalangeal (MP) joint. The surgeon told me about the dismal prospects for the ring finger to be viable, and tried to talk me into removing it to the same disarticulation level as the little finger. I told him I needed to think about it. The ring finger tip was poking thru the top of the bandages and looked a bit funky, but it was warm to the touch.
I was assigned a hospital room to continue my recovery, it looked like I'd be staying for awhile. The stay was reasonably nice, family and friends visited, with awkward moments like when a friend offered me some Vienna Fingers cookies as a joke. I was hooked up to a morphine drip, with the control to self-regulate the dosage. I found out it's only a partial control, limiting the additional jolts to six per hour. The first 36 hours after the initial surgery were relatively pain free, and I found I didn't need to use the button much at all. I also slept quite a lot of the time, at least when I wasn't getting poked, prodded, probed, pumped, and preened. My plumbing still worked good, so I used the portable urinal to empty my bladder instead of needing a catheter. On Tuesday, I was able to get the nurses to unhook the tubes and such enough to allow me to get into the bathroom and let me take my first post-amputation dump. Ah, what a relief! Again in the evening, some new visitors, some repeat visitors. Good friends helping to pass the time. ***
(Continued in "Interests & Hobbies" below...)
Interests
restoring cars, restoring houses, restoring foreskins *** AFTERCARE AND HEALING PROCESS:I was allowed to leave the hospital on Thursday evening after showing I was stable. The first stop was the pharmacy to pick up a prescription of OxyContin for the pain. Upon arriving home, I was trying to get back into the routine and went to turn on a light switch with the left hand. I misjudged slightly, ramming the raw ring finger stump right into the toggle handle of the switch. That smarted! It sent pain I've never felt before shooting through my arm. Lesson learned - I never did that again! There were other pain issues as well, but mainly when sleeping, and only after the OxyContin prescription ran out. The hand surgeon continued to refill the OxyContin, and finally had me switch over to Ambien CR near the end of my recovery. Aftercare involved weekly, and subsequently bi-weekly, follow-up visits with the hand surgeon, having him unwrap the Jones bandage and inspect the progress of my healing. The healing process took about 3 weeks until the stitches could be removed at the third weekly follow-up appointment. The first stitch for the surgeon to take out was the one at the base of my truncated ring finger. This stitch held the nerve ending inside the proximal phalanx of the ring finger as the surgeon had described earlier. The majority of the other stitches weren't quite ready to be removed, and I was referred to a hand therapist for rehabilitation. Within another week I started to work many of the other stitches out. Those that remained were removed by the hand therapists before therapy began in earnest.The hand therapy program started immediately after my third post-op follow-up with the hand surgeon when he removed the stitch securing the nerve. The therapy first started with measurements of the sound hand and the injured hand for length, range of motion, strength, and the like, making notes where the fingers were amputated on left hand as well. The therapy then commenced with gentle stretching, exercise, desensitization procedures, scar massage, and strength training. The first time the scar massage was done, I was shown how a battery-powered hand massager and Vitamin E oil are used in the procedure. After having the therapist do the scar massage the first couple of times, I was allowed to do the scar massage myself. I got a bit exuberant with the massage proceeded to hit the chewed up section of the ulna bone in my wrist right under the skin graft with too much pressure, and I nearly passed out.A couple of 'otoforms' were fashioned out of a rubbery compound with a catalyst, mixed together by the hand therapist similar to the method for mixing Bondo auto body filler. The mixture was spread over the entire area of the skin graft area on the wrist and the bottom of the palm for the first otoform. The second otoform covered the ring finger stump and the scar leading along the outside of it down to the scar atop the area where my little finger used to be attached to my hand. The otoforms were to be used for the protection and softening of the scars and were held in place initially by an ace bandage, and about 8 days later by a 9 tube of stockinette with a hole cut out for my left thumb to poke through. These otoforms were to be worn as often as possible when I wasn't doing my exercises.Therapy exercises included those designed to desensitize the scarred areas, those designed to toughen skin grafts, those designed to increase range of motion in affected joints, and those designed to strengthen the hand in general. Therapy included manipulating the modeling clay, the beans, the pebbles, the rice, the blocks. Therapy also included weighted machines, and scar massage. Since I was out of work due to this injury, I treated the hand therapy as my job. I was dedicated to going to the therapy sessions, staying as long as possible without overdoing it, listening to the therapists and absorbing their directions on how to perform the exercises, asking how many sets of exercises are too many, etc. Armed with this information, I spent hours upon hours doing the exercises when I was not in the therapy sessions. I would do the exercises while at home, I would do them while out taking walks around town, I would do them when riding in the car. I did them pretty much everywhere, not constantly. I did take breaks and avoided doing too many of them, but I did my best to max out the exercises as much as possible. The therapists told me they were extremely pleased with my progress and that its very rare for any patient to so totally embrace the therapy regimen, proving that doing so is beneficial to a speedy recovery. The therapy progressed to a point where no more gains were to be made from it, so I was sent back to the hand surgeon for a final evaluation. Therapy had continued for about 6 weeks starting 3 times a week and tapering down to twice a week in the final 2 weeks. *** (Continued in "Movies & Shows" below...)
rextangle8
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