Hate To Say It, But I Told You Toe!
A new surgery center at St. Mary’s Hospital in San Francisco uses a teamwork approach to complex reconstructive surgeries. Specialists from St. Mary’s and UCSF are partnering to offer state-of-the-art treatment for patients like Garrett La Fever, who lost part of his hand in a woodworking accident.
“The piece I was cutting got bound up in-between fence and popped back and cut my thumb off,” says La Fever. Doctors reattached what was left, but the results were poor.
The thumb is responsible for 40 percent of the function of the hand which is why when doctors proposed removing Garrett’s big toe and using it to create a new thumb.
“I wanted to do it. I was sick of having that thumb and there was an option to get out of it.”
Now, a month and a half after his microvascular surgery, Garrett’s new “thumb” is recovering nicely. “As long as I don’t put this hand near it, It looks like a normal thumb.”
How great would it have been if they would have replaced his thumb with his pinkie toe! Baby hands!
Feel free to outdo each other’s toe-finger-hand puns in this open forum otherwise known as the comments.
January 24th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
I REALLY want to say something here, but I cannot put it into words. :/ And, well, that which I can put into words just shouldn’t be!
January 25th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
That was really cool for the guy…but I would think it would be awkward having a missing toe thats not really missing…they should have used his middle toe or something…it might have been more normal sized…huh. Cool. but odd.