Finger marathon

By Paul Pickering
PLASTIC surgeons at Dandenong Hospital have reattached all the fingers and the thumb on the right hand of a carpenter who sliced them off with a circular saw.
The operations was an 11-hour microsurgica marathon.
The surgeons are confident that the intricate procedure will allow Punsak Hewett, 38, to resume work within six months.
Recovering steadily last Friday, the Ferntree Gully carpenter said the seemingly innocuous incident would have cost him his livelihood if not for the efforts of Dandenong’s ambitious team of surgeons.
Mr Hewett was in the workshop at his Ferntree Gully home about 4pm on Friday, 22 June, building a wardrobe unit for his son’s bedroom.
“It was a bit cold and I decided to put on my gloves to cut some panel boards with a docking saw (a type of fixed drop-saw),” he said.
“My glove caught on the blade and it took all my fingers with it.”
Mr Hewett recalled that after running inside to tell his nine-year-old daughter to call an ambulance, his first instinct was to recover his fingers.
“There was no pain and I wasn’t in shock,” he said.
“All I was focused on was finding the fingers.”
As they waited for the ambulance to arrive, Mr Hewett and his wife Rachel searched for the severed digits, finding two fingers almost immediately.
Mrs Hewett then collected another two as her husband was being loaded into the ambulance.
A friend later found the illusive thumb at the end of a six-foot trail of blood.
When Mr Hewett arrived at Dandenong Hospital, plastic reconstructive surgeon James Leong and his team were waiting to accept the challenge.
“It was always going to be a very difficult surgery,” Mr Leong later said.
“It would only be seen once or twice a year in Melbourne where someone would lose all five fingers.”
After entering the theatre at 7.30pm, Mr Hewett emerged at 6.30am the next morning with his fingers in place.
Mr Leong, 41, said that he was actually surprised by the duration of the surgery, given that it usually takes between three and four hours to reattach a single finger.
The intricate procedure involved reattaching bones, tendons, nerves, veins and arteries.
While he was not prepared to predict a full recovery just yet, Mr Leong was confident about his patient’s chances of regaining 80 per cent movement in his fingers.
“It’s now day 10 and the fingers are all still good, so there is a very high chance that he’ll be successful,” he said.
“Usually, you’re out of the woods if all the fingers are still alive in about three weeks.”
Mr Leong acknowledged that Dandenong Hospital was not necessarily known for microsurgical procedures and praised his team for their enthusiasm.
“Some may not have taken it on because it was a pretty big challenge,” he said.
Having trained at St Vincents Hospital, famous for pioneering microsurgery in Australia, Mr Leong said: “I was always confident that we’d be able to do it and we all worked together very well.”
Chatting happily from his hospital bed, Mr Hewett said he was eternally grateful to the surgeons and glad that he had come to Dandenong Hospital.
While he is fully aware of the program of extensive therapy that lies ahead, the father of four is predicting a return to the workshop within six months.
Perhaps crossing his fingers will be the first challenge.