My Left Thumb
I did this damage to myself on my mom's 40th birthday. I was nine years old at the time. While my parents were getting dressed to go out for breakfast, I went outside to ride my brother's go-kart. I went around our house a couple of times and everything was all right. Then, on the third trip, I hit a milk crate that was in the middle of our yard. This knocked the steering and brakes out. The go-kart flew out of control into the chain link fence which surrounded our home. I was caged into the go-kart by the fence. My thumb was stuck between the steering wheel and the fence. I started struggling to get out like a caged animal. In my struggle to get free, I pulled my thumb off. That white string you see dangling from my severed thumb is a tendon that I pulled out of my arm.
Using microsurgical techniques, Dr. Aird from Lake Butler Hand Institute (now known as Ramadan Hand Institute) re-attached my thumb. As they were closing up my hand (and arm--they did, after all, have to re-attach that tendon), I developed a blood clot in one of my arteries. The doctors decided to replace the clotted artery, which was badly damaged, with one of the other arteries in my hand. They did so, and this time they actually got to close things up. The surgery took a total of eleven-and-a-half hours.
After a bit, I was allowed to go home. I had to keep my arm elevated to aid in blood circulation. Everything was looking cool until one day, my parents noticed that the tip of my thumb protruding from the tip of my cast was discolored. We went to Dr. Ramadan's Hand Center in Gainesville. (I'm pretty sure this was a Saturday because I believe that Dr. Ramadan had to be called from a University of Florida football game.) He looked at my thumb and told us to keep an eye on it. He also said that I should have no caffeine for a while.
We did keep an eye on my thumb. It grew steadily worse. Slight discoloration became severe discoloration. I was again admitted to the hospital. The doctors said that my thumb was dying. Apparently because of the severe trauma that the tissues suffered, my body was rejecting the thumb. They told us that we would have to wait to see how much of the thumb would die. Then, they would scrape away all the dead tissues and see whether a skin graft would be necessary.
So there was nothing to do but wait. Every morning, my mom took me for a walk around the hospital and we talked. (I was quite fortunate. My mom was allowed to stay in the room with me during my entire hospital stay. She slept in the bed right next to mine.) There in the hospital, I watched my thumb turn black on my hand and die.
Eventually, the doctors decided that it was time for surgery. After removing my dead tissues, they discovered that I had some bone exposed. This meant that they would have to do a skin graft. Because of my body's rejection of the thumb, it was decided that the thumb should be attached to my groin for a period of time so that the graft would be more likely to take hold.
So I was to have my thumb attached to my groin for three weeks. I was allowed to move around and such, and everything was cool until I went to the doctor's office for a check-up one week later. the bone from my hand had poked through the skin graft. This was quite an emergency. There in the doctor's office we had to do emergency surgery with no anesthetic. The doctor poked the bone back into the skin pouch and sewed it up. This hurt a lot. I was put in a full-torso body cast to prevent this problem from occurring again. I was also placed on complete bed rest for the next three-and-a-half weeks.
When the time came for me to return to the hospital, my dad got the local funeral home to help carry me to the hospital. (I couldn't get in the family van; and if the ambulance had taken me to the hospital, we would have had to pay quite a bit more money.) I rode to the hospital in a hearse.
The surgery was successful. I had a thumb with skin on it as well as a nice scar which no one but my (non-existent) future wife will see. However, we weren't aware of a very serious complication.
From birth until about age ten, children are still learning how to walk. This is why children stumble around and fall a lot. When that learning process is interrupted, it is possible for a child to forget how to walk. This is precisely what happened to me. Being on complete bed rest for so long interrupted my pattern of walking and caused my muscles to atrophy. When I put my weight on my feet the next day, I felt a great pain in my legs and would have fallen without the assistance of the nurses.
From that point, I began the painful and frustrating process of learning how to walk again. I was forced into this process by a nurse named Sandra who I would come to hate for making me walk the halls of the hospital as physical therapy. When I was sent home, I was still in a wheelchair. I pretty much had to be wheeled everywhere I went. The next step was a walker. I also had to wear support hose to provide additional stability for my wobbly legs. Using that walker, I helped my family decorate our Christmas tree. After a long convalescence, I was finally able to walk again by myself. However, I still have some lingering effects from my ordeal. I have a lot of trouble walking down stairs--especially if they're steep. Also, my left knee is now weak and occasionally goes out of place if I do a lot of strenuous exercise. (For this reason, I couldn't play on my middle school football team.) Other than that, though, I don't have a whole lot of problems anymore. In fact, I even played basketball during my ninth grade year of high school with no ill effects.
At last, we thought that my surgeries were at an end. We were wrong. On two or three occasions after this, the bone in my thumb poked through the skin graft. Each time it did this, I had to go back into surgery to have it stitched up. During my last surgery, they also trimmed the bone; and it hasn't poked through since.
So, my tale is at an end. Where do things stand now? When the doctors performed the skin graft, they didn't believe that I would ever have feeling in my thumb again because nerves don't really regenerate. However, sometimes young children mend in ways that defy conventional logic. I have very limited feeling in the tip of my thumb. I can feel hot or cold. I can also feel someone touching my thumb. This is amplified by the fact that my thumb has small hairs growing on the tip. (After all, this skin did come from a different part of my body.) I notice when these tiny hairs move, and this allows me to feel things with my thumb. However, I developed a tendency to use my index finger as a thumb when grabbing things because I'm less likely to drop them that way. I also figured out how to play Nintendo one-handed--a pretty strange site when you first see it. (Basically, I use my index finger on the control pad, middle finger for the Start/Select buttons, ring finger for the B button, and pinky for the A button. On a Genesis controller, the process is similar. I just use the middle finger as a fire button instead of the Start/Select button.)
I also have a terrible fear of people drawing blood now. I have very deep veins. Every time they had to draw blood or put in an IV, it was a major effort. Before one surgery, I was poked about four times in each arm with no success. They decided that they would just wait until I got into the ER, and the anesthesiologist would put it in. The anesthesiologist had no more luck. After jabbing both my arms repeatedly, she moved to my feet with no more success. Finally, they administered a anesthetic gas with a nifty little plastic gas mask. Once they had me knocked out, they just jabbed me until they could get an IV in. They finally got it in a vein in my foot. For precisely this reason, I don't go offer to give blood at the local blood bank.
Recently, I passed a milestone. I've now lived more of my life
without my thumb than I did with it. I can honestly say that even
if we were ever able to re-grow limbs, I would keep my thumb the
way it is. It is a part of me, and I like it just the way it is.