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Lived Through This
What to Expect When You Steal Medical Leeches From the Hospital
Because I wish someone had warned me
Content warning: Graphic descriptions of injury
If you ever need hand surgery, you should try to get it done in Japan.
At least that’s what the hand surgeon at Mass General Hospital told us right before he spent 10 hours trying to reattach my husband’s severed left index finger.
The surgeon’s tone was cheerful and matter-of-fact as he talked with us. We were sitting on a cot in the emergency room on a Friday night. Jared had been working on a project at our house when his hand got sucked into the blade of a table saw by a loose thread. His clothes looked like a Jackson Pollock painting, with regular dirt and oil stains interrupted by bright-red streaks of blood.
A two-inch section of his finger rested on ice in the kind of silver bowl we use at home when we make popcorn. The bloody part was loosely wrapped with gauze, but the rest of the finger looked normal, like it was about to click a computer mouse or flick an ant away from a picnic.
According to the surgeon, Japanese culture places a high value on having all 10 fingers. So Japanese surgeons have perfected all kinds of fancy surgeries for fixing chopped, sliced, maimed, and mangled hands. And luckily for us, our surgeon had studied there. He took a look at Jared’s finger stub in the bowl and nodded.
“I can fix that,” he assured us.
I waited in the lobby for 10 hours, cycling through coffee, magazines, and bathroom visits while the surgeon sat at a microscope, reuniting severed blood vessels, muscle, skin, and bone.
At 2 a.m., a nurse came to get me, and I headed up to Jared’s room. His raw, unbandaged hand rested on a pillow. All five fingers were there, although one of them was held in place with black thread. The temperature in the room had been cranked up to over 100 degrees to promote blood flow and healing.
Success.
I fell asleep on a cot outside the room.
