Skil-less Saw

As a relatively new medic I responded to a call for a "man bleeding from the hand". Okay, easy enough to treat, all BLS skills. Our update however, informed us that the patient had taken his finger off with a skil saw.



That changed things a bit because I had never been on an amputation before. The veteran, non-medic, firefighter on my crew immediately responded, "Oh great, that means I have to go and find the finger." That lightened things up for me.

As we pulled up on scene we saw a man in the driveway with a towel wrapped around his hand and, fortunately for the firefighter, the man's wife holding a small tupperware container. She had a look on her face of almost bemusement and wonder which I can only assume was born out of a lifetime of picking up after whatever 'the idiot did this time'. As we had surmised, she had the finger wrapped and on ice in the tupperware exactly as it should be.

We sat the patient down on the tailboard of the engine and I examined the man's wound. I can't really predict how I would react in this man's situation, but I hope I would keep it together a little better. He proceeded to completely lose his s**t and freak out when I took the towel off. He had sliced off his middle finger without damaging any of the others, not sure how he did that. He started repeatedly screaming, "It's gone! It's f***ing gone!" while staring wild eyed at his hand. I had to resort to the tricks we use when treating children, namely distraction and covering the wound as soon as possible. My captain stepped in and started asking the patient questions about his date of birth, phone number, address, medical history, etc, anything to keep him talking and looking away from his hand. I bandaged the hand and wrapped it up like a large mitten so the patient couldn't see the missing spot. An I.V. and a little morphine later and he was relatively calmer.

The patient was taken off to the trauma center where hopefully they would send him off to have his finger reattached. His wife had done exactly the right thing (wrap the part in gauze, put it in a plastic bag, and place the bag over ice) and it was a pretty clean cut so the odds were in his favor for reattachment. And if it didn't work out, he could always make one of these: