A Degloving Injury

Warning: Don't look at these pictures if you're squeamish. Picture 1, Picture 2. They're the latest stomach-turners circulating around the internet. You've been warned! But if you think you can handle it, the pictures are interesting from an anatomical perspective.

They show a "degloved" finger. A woman, while drunk, snagged her ring on a spiked fence, thereby peeling the skin off her finger. Her friends had the presence of mind to put the 'finger glove' in a glass of water and take her to a hospital.

The images are strange, but real. They come from a recent article in The Internet Journal of Orthopedic Surgery. I'm sure the images wouldn't seem strange to someone who's used to seeing this kind of stuff. But I'm not, and they look very strange to me.

The good news is that, should your finger ever be degloved, the skin can be reattached. But after seeing these pictures, I'm thinking maybe it would be safer not to wear my ring anymore. (via Marianas Eye)

Gross Health/Medicine

Posted on Thu Jun 19, 2008


Comments

Those pictures are still better than Ben Affleck('s Big Head)!
Posted by Tah  on  Fri Jun 20, 2008  at  12:15 AM
Yeah, nasty stuff..

I worked for a short time at a Toyota dealership, and while waiting for my interview, perused the Prius maintainence handbook that was there.. Let me tell you, if you have a hybrid, treat the electrical components with a LOT of respect! There was a photo of a man's hand after it had contacted one of the current-bearing cables. It had blown off most of the thumb, down to the bone, without any burning, just.. gone. Ow.
Posted by Robin Bobcat  on  Fri Jun 20, 2008  at  12:23 AM
I think in the Stephen King Book "Geralds Game" the chick ends up degloving her hand to get out of a pair of handcuffs that she's trapped in.

Looks... EXTREMELY painful.
Posted by Emidawg  on  Fri Jun 20, 2008  at  02:06 AM
I am never wearing gloves again!
Posted by OJ  on  Fri Jun 20, 2008  at  06:44 AM
Oh, the second one looks like some kind of evil drink. Gross.
Posted by red_dragon_girl_69  on  Fri Jun 20, 2008  at  08:30 AM
As a manufacturing engineer who's worked in a few factories, I have had to sit through a lot of safety orientations which involved pictures like this to encourage you to NOT VIOLATE SAFETY RULES EVER. They're unbelievably gory.
Posted by Erica  on  Fri Jun 20, 2008  at  01:04 PM
I had a temporary job at DuPont Co. once, and had to watch a safety video that showed a finger pulled from someone's hand by a machine, and the finger had an arm's length tendon still attached to it... I almost spewed, but I still have all my fingers... since then, I've lost an eye, most of my teeth, a goodly portion of my hair, and the larger part of whatever functions as my brain, but I still got my damn fingers... go finger
Posted by Hairy Houdini  on  Sun Jun 22, 2008  at  08:31 PM
A similar thing happened to my mother on the first day of a family holiday. She jumped down from a sailing boat into shallow water, placing her hand on the boat to steady herself - and her wedding ring caught on a winch fitting. The flesh wasn't ripped all the way off the finger but by the time she got to hospital her entire finger was black. She had 6hrs of micro-surgery and luckily they could reattach one blood vessel and save her finger. She was in hospital for a week; she said the worst bit of the hospital stay was the fact that the nurses insisted on passing on similar stories. The most gory was the story of the teenager with waist-length hair worn in a plait who went on dodgems at the local funfair. Her plait got wound up in the car's mechanism and her scalp was ripped off - and couldn't be reattached. Several warnings here I think...
Posted by JJ  on  Fri Jul 20, 2012  at  08:51 AM
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