Reattaching an infant's severed finger is a little like trying to guide a shoelace through a hole with a carrot stick. The needle's about three times the size of the child's tiny blood vessels. The suture itself, though it's much thinner than the thickness of a single hair, is very nearly unwieldy.
But don't tell Woods "Woodzie" Ford about the long odds for success. Monday, he squealed and laughed as the bandages came off his hand, then batted playfully at Dr. Douglas T. Hutchinson, associate professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of Utah Medical School and the man who put the pinky back on Woodzie's right hand.On Jan. 15, the baby, then 9 months old, and his big brother, Jesse, now 2 1/2, were playing in the family room of their Rock Springs, Wyo., home. Their mom, Julie Ford, was folding laundry and ducked out of the room to put some away. A minute later, she heard a piercing scream and ran into the family room to find Woodzie writhing and weeping, surrounded by blood, still in his "bouncy chair."
Jesse was standing in the corner, hands over his eyes, screaming. He had cut off his brother's little finger with a pair of scissors.
Ford knew to gather the finger and keep it cold. But at the hospital, doctors took an X-ray, gave the baby pain medicine and said he should be flown to Utah for treatment if they wanted to save the finger.
Meanwhile, her husband Charles, an emergency room doctor, was out of state attending his mother's funeral. He learned of the accident while he was waiting for a plane to come home. Instead, he flew into Salt Lake City and went straight to University Hospital.
Hutchinson didn't want to discourage the family, but he didn't want to give them false hope, either.
"The whole thing with microsurgery is, since the '60s, the changes have been not in our technical ability but in the size of the needle and thread. It's very fine -- a lot thinner than a human hair."
The needle is so small, in fact, that it is machine-threaded at the manufacturing plant. But it was still three times bigger than the baby's blood vessels, Hutchinson said.
In a four-hour surgery, Hutchinson managed to place only four stitches, which he likened to sewing a cut garden hose back together with four stitches. It was bound to leak. And they expected it. The surgical team only hoped they would be able to maintain enough blood supply to give the finger a chance to stay alive and healthy. Hutchinson was far from sure it would work, but he wanted to try.
That meant the four stitches and a few tiny pins, as well. After three weeks, the pins were removed. And Monday, the big bandage came off, to be replaced only by a small, temporary splint.
They are counting on Woodzie's youth to make the surgery work. Hutchinson said he often tells adults they are not good candidates for such a surgery. Children have almost magical power to heal and they are adaptable enough to shrug off minor problems. With an adult, it's easier to learn to live without a finger than endanger the entire hand's effectiveness, which sometimes happens.
When the bandage came off, Woodzie didn't favor the finger, though he did extend it slightly. It will be a while before doctors can tell how the finger will do. But it's a healthy pink, which is a marvelous sign. He doesn't yet have feeling in his finger tip, so his parents were told they'd have to keep him safe from things like burning it. And there's a possibility he will need more surgery to straighten it, should it become more crooked. In the meantime, he'll wear a small splint for a couple of weeks, Hutchinson said, just to provide a little extra protection.