Thumb Injury, deep slice by glass

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RebelWarrior - 09 Jan 2005 05:48 GMT

Hi everyone.
Two days ago I was pulling broken glass out of my bedroom window. One
piece was stuck, I don't remember exactly how but the next thing I knew
I was staring at a deep gash in my right thumb. In the split second
before the blood starts to pour I saw, basically, the inside of my
thumb including bone. It started at the second line up and stopped at
the top line. I'm pretty sure I nicked both the tendon and the nerve.
Slightly above where the cut stopped is a few small white areas, if I
touch the area by accident or bump it, it hurts like heck, and if I
lightly touch it though I can't feel a thing, this area of the thumb,
no bigger than a dime cut in half, feels dead to the touch.
I didn't get stitches or anything, am just letting it heal itself.
However I'm wondering about that nerve and whether this small area of
no feeling will ever be normal again?

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Carey Gregory - 09 Jan 2005 06:13 GMT

>Hi everyone.
>Two days ago I was pulling broken glass out of my bedroom window. One
[quoted text clipped - 10 lines]
>However I'm wondering about that nerve and whether this small area of
>no feeling will ever be normal again?

Who the hell knows? A cut that deep needed medical attention. Maybe your
hand will work right again someday and maybe it won't. It might even get
far worse than it is now.

Oh, and I don't suppose you've had a tetanus shot in the last 10 years...

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PF Riley - 09 Jan 2005 06:36 GMT

If you truly have a well-defined area of numbness then you probably
did severe a small branch of a cutaneous sensory nerve. Generally some
sensation will return to the numb area over several months as other
nearby branches sprout new nerve endings but it probably won't be the
same as before.

PF

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bae@cs.toronto.no-uce.edu - 12 Jan 2005 15:50 GMT

>If you truly have a well-defined area of numbness then you probably
>did severe a small branch of a cutaneous sensory nerve. Generally some
>sensation will return to the numb area over several months as other
>nearby branches sprout new nerve endings but it probably won't be the
>same as before.

I'm curious about this, since I was under the mistaken impression that the
severed nerve actually regenerated, perhaps by growing back into the
severed sheath if the two parts matched up.

I've read that when surgeons reattach a severed hand, microsurgery is used
to rejoin the nerves, but now I'm curious about how healing or regrowth
takes place. Are the nerve cells actually able to rejoin, or does the
part distal to the injury die? Do the nerve cells re-extend into the
nerve sheath and re-innervate the hand? Are they able to "find their way"
back to the part that they originally innervated, or is it random, and
the brain has to learn to reinterpret the sensations from the hand?

How much recovery of sensation is possible in one of these cases? How far
back toward the spine can a nerve be severed and still regenerate even
partially? What about motor nerves?

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