Summer Home Repair Safety Tips to Prevent Hand and Finger Injuries

By Nebil Bill Aydin, MD, New York Group for Plastic Surgery

Hand and finger injuries are among the most common causes for emergency room visits, but taking time to prepare a safe work area, using proper tools and alerting someone nearby about your home repair project can reduce your risk for serious accidents this summer. I’ve operated on many tool-related upper limb injuries, including the wrist laceration experienced by my patient David Guiliano of Valhalla, NY, that nearly cost him his left hand.

David, a firefighter and a professional bricklayer, was renovating a friend’s pool house. He stood on an overturned bucket and held his heavy electric grinder tool in both hands high over his head. As he pushed grinder to brick, the blade tip caught and jerked, pushing him backward. As he fell, the grinder slipped from his grasp and the blade sliced his left wrist, cutting through tendons, nerves and arteries down to the bone.

With no one else around, David crawled to his truck for a towel to wrap around his hand, and called 911 on his mobile phone, staying connected so emergency dispatch could track his location. He lay down with his cut hand high over his head and squeezed an upper arm pressure point with his other hand to control the bleeding until an ambulance arrived.

I worked with a team for seven hours performing microsurgery to repair David’s wrist and hand. Microsurgery is a very complex, technically demanding surgery that uses specialized tools with microscopes to operate on extremely small parts of the body. When a tendon, nerve, vein, or artery is lacerated, we take a healthy one from another area of the body and graft it to the injury site. Without microsurgical techniques we would not have been able to preserve David’s hand at all, much less restore its use.

Looking back, David realized that his many years as a bricklayer led to complacency about home repair work. He urges everyone to take time to prepare properly and put some simple safety measures in place for any task using tools.

Regardless of experience, following simple safety rules can help you avoid a serious injury:

·      Think through tools and materials you’ll need, and position them strategically in your work area before starting. If you realize midway that you’ve forgotten a tool, carefully and fully disengage from your work to get it — do not lean over or reach up for it.

·      Do not use a tool that lacks safety mechanisms or is inappropriate for a specific task. If you’re unsure, check with an expert at the hardware store.

·      Alert a family member or neighbor that you’re undertaking a home repair project and ask if they’ll come by to check up on you.

·      Keep a phone and first aid supplies nearby, in case. If you’re not at your own home, be sure you know the specific address so emergency dispatch can find you, and be aware of a nearby major medical center.

Thanks to his firefighter training, David Guiliano took basic steps that likely saved his life as well as his hand. And he now strives to heed the advice of his wife, Rosemary, and children, David and Gina, to take a breath and slow down before starting any tasks!

Dr. Aydin, a board certified plastic and reconstructive surgeon, is Assistant Professor of Surgery at the New York Medical College and Attending Surgeon at the Westchester Medical Center. He is a partner with the New York Group for Plastic Surgery.