Ah, soft tissue amputation. Well I remember the days when people
didn't tell me, "Gosh, I would never have known if you didn't hold
your thumbs up side by side!"
I had the pad of my thumb nipped neatly off by the hinge-edge of a
slammed door (in a psych unit, as I was one-to-one-ing the
homicidal sixteen-year-old who truly, despite having attacked many
of her peers and counselors, clearly had no intention of removing
any of my body-parts that day) and have no idea how much it would
have bled on its own because before I knew what was happening, I
had clamped my thumb in the fist of the same hand and was squeezing
as tightly as I could. I didn't even know I was missing anything
until the door opened again and a small, soft, oval, beige object
fell to the floor. "That's my thumb," I said calmly.
The nurses bundled me down the hall as other staff took up position
to watch the homicidal sixteen-year-old who was facing away from
the door and saying in a monotone, "I didn't mean to. I didn't mean
to." I was calling back over my shoulder, "Could someone get the
bit of my thumb that came off, and wrap it and put it on ice?" I
think they thought I was in shock, but I'm usually like that in a
crisis.
(I asked the nurses politely if they could please call my staffing
agency and let them know what had happened. When the on-call person
called back and got them to let her speak with me, she said, "Oh my
GOD!!! Are you all RIGHT!!?!" and I said carefully, "Well, that
depends on what you mean by all right." She was still telling that
story months later.)
(Oh, and speaking of compression? A piece of tissue amputated by
being squeezed off in a door is not, in fact, reattachable, or mine
wasn't. I was very persistent about getting it to the hospital with
me, but it turned out there wasn't a hope. On the other hand, no
one seemed to want to take responsibility for throwing the severed
tissue away, even after I'd had the skin graft surgery instead, and
it sat in a tub on my hospital room windowsill for two more
days.)
Later, when the (marvelous) EMTs arrived, one of them knelt down
next to me and said, "Could you open your fist so I can see the
injury?" And I discovered in myself a great reluctance. I said
distantly, "I'd really rather not."
It didn't actually start bleeding freely until 45 minutes or an
hour later, in the ER, I think, when the very serious young surgeon
on duty was explaining to me that if it were any other finger, they
would nip back the bone until they had enough skin to sew over it,
but, he said apologetically, "Not to make a bad joke out of it, but
with thumbs, length really does matter."
Ah, how it all comes back. If this were Livejournal, I could use my
hand x-ray icon which says "Thumbthing Wicked." My friends did not
stop making thumb jokes for months.
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