This morning was pretty exciting. It was a relatively slow morning in the ED, perhaps surprising day after 4th of July which is notorious for hand-related firework injuries, but then again any of those probably would have come in overnight. But because it was slow I was able to work on a firework-unrelated hand injury; I got to sew up the fingers of a young lad who works as junior arborist and accidentally grabbed a live hedger blade. It was a pretty gnarly injury. Lacerations along all 4 fingers, some of them going down to the tendon, but the tendons were all intact. He still had good strength and function, so no need for a plastic surgeon apparently. He was wearing a thick leather glove when it happened and I can only imagine what would have happened if he wasn’t. The lacerations were not very neat so it took of thought as to how best to re-approximate the wound edges and took us all of 4 hours to finish the the whole thing, but in the end I think it looked pretty good. Ended up putting a total of 26 stitches. He was a good sport with the whole think. Putting in sutures is definitely an activity I’ve come to enjoy and one I hope I’ll have space to do in my future practice.
The rest of the day was pretty unremarkable, but good overall. Wasn’t bored and got to see some bread and butter cases.
nANIMOv 