The surgeons at the SOS Mains center at the Clinique de l’Union near Toulouse treat many injuries related to summer activities.
The month of July is synonymous with festivities, especially around July 14th. Every year, many individuals organize evenings around a barbecue and sometimes a few tricks to spice it up. But such a program can sometimes turn tragic. At the Clinique de l’Union, in the north of Toulouse, doctors specializing in hand injuries treat dozens of patients daily with serious damage to their hands at the SOS Mains centre. This is the case of the surgeon Pierre Croutzet and five other practitioners. Like any other hospital, at the Union Clinic, an emergency department is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
When the patient presents, he is received by a regulating nurse who, depending on the severity of the injury, directs him to a doctor or the operating room. This summer with the multiple strikes in the emergency departments of public hospitals, a resurgence of activity is to be noted within the emergency room of the clinic. But beyond this postponement of patients, Dr Pierre Croutzet takes care of the wounded from various neighboring departments. “In fact, here we have a whole service dedicated to the management of traumatic hand injuries. All emergency services have the possibility of treating but we are often called upon to manage patients with serious hand injuries because we have an entire space and a team dedicated to this type of operation”.
2 300 interventions par an
During the summer, the SOS Mains center receives patients with typical summer injuries. Among the most frequent: deep cuts. “A lot of people when they organize barbecues come out with a big piece of meat. With ill-sharpened knives, they start cutting and unfortunately sometimes it ends badly. If the meat is frozen, the knife slips and ends up in the hand,” he points out.
With his colleagues, they carry out around ten operations a day to repair the damage caused, ie more than 2,300 a year. “For clean wounds such as large cuts, it’s often simpler and the convalescence is shorter”, specifies the health professional.
According to him, injuries related to the use of fireworks or homemade Bengal lights remain rare but do exist. “We call it ballistic damage, meaning it’s the same result as being shot in the hand. There is the burning of the tissues linked to the explosion and then a lot of damage to the tendons, the fingers, ”explains the doctor once more. On this type of lesion, work in the operating theater is often more dangerous and requires hours of debridement, that is to say cleaning the wound and removing the damaged tissue. Sometimes the patient’s state of health is such that an amputation must be performed. For the others, it takes more than a month to recover following going to the operating room.
This is the reason why the Toulouse surgeon wishes to call on the inhabitants to be vigilant. “We must not manipulate this type of artifice and even less leave it within the reach of children,” he insists. Moreover, apart from the damage caused by a cut or the explosion of a firecracker, in summer, domestic accidents resulting from the use of gardening equipment such as chainsaws, saws or even hedge trimmers are legion.
