An Indian chef who works at a diner in Al Nahda, Dubai, sliced off two of the fingers of his right hand while working.
Sutharshan Subramaniyan, an ex-pat from Tamil Nadu, started his workday as he usually does by cleaning the noodle cutter. He did not realise that the blade was also attached to the equipment while washing it and therefore got his fingers sliced.
He stated, “It happened all of a sudden. All I could see was a splash of blood all around.”
He was bleeding, but he did not realise that he had lost his fingers.
“I assumed it was a deep cut. But my coworkers came and tried to control the bleeding using ice.”
That was when he saw something unusual.
“I realised that my fingers were not there, which was horrific and shocking,” said Subramaniyan, who arrived in the UAE five months ago.
The chef, aged 25, was rushed to the hospital by his colleagues within 30 minutes of the incident. Subramaniyan went under a 12-hour long journey to Aster Hospital in Al Qusais and got his fingers reattached.
A plastic surgeon specialist, Dr Rajkumar Ramachandran, said Subramaniyan’s index finger was cut from the centre while his middle finger was chopped off from the tip, making the surgery more complex.
He said, “When the cut is from the tip, we cannot join the arteries and veins. But we somehow managed to do it well.”
Dr Ramachandran highlighted that replanting fingers is a complicated and complex procedure that takes hours. “In this case, replanting the middle finger was indeed a challenge. We had adopted a digital replant of the fingers. In this procedure, we join the amputated parts’ veins, arteries, and nerves to the remaining fingers. This is the difficult part of replanting procedures.”
If the arteries and veins does not join properly, the fingers will start to decay within a few days. The doctor gave him blood thinners to avoid clotting in the reattached parts.
Subramaniyan was discharged from the hospital after almost ten days.
“The doctor has told me that it would take about eight to 10 weeks for the injury to dry and the fingers to become properly fixed and normal,” he said.