A deep cut on the palm side of your fingers, hand, wrist, or forearm can damage your flexor tendons, which are tissues that help control movement in your hand. A flexor tendon injury can make it impossible to bend your fingers or thumb; motion that may be regained with timely hand surgery.
“When a tendon is cut, if caught early enough, we can take those two ends and bring them close together and suture them,” says Dr. Dennis Sagini, an orthopedic hand surgeon on medical staff of Lee Memorial Health System.
Because flexor tendons tend to be close to the skin’s surface a deep cut or laceration will likely impact one. Because nerves in the fingers are also close to the tendon, a cut may damage them as well. It requires a delicate touch to make the repair.
“We do operate under magnification if we’re fixing nerves that were injured along with the tendon. There is a very precise type of suture that we use, there’s a very precise technique of suturing the tendon leads to better recovery,” says Dr. Sagini.
Surgery is usually performed on an outpatient basis. Once the patient goes home, the work for them is just beginning. With these advanced techniques, doctors can reconnect the tendon, but if therapy is not followed, a good outcome can slip through their fingers.
“The surgery usually lasts somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour. But the therapy is about 6 weeks to 3 months. And in that period we can’t allow a patient who has had a tendon repair to be too aggressive with flexion because it will pull that tendon apart that we’ve repaired,” says Dr. Sagini.
Although most flexor tendon injuries are accidental, a complete recovery takes practice and patience.
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Lee Memorial Health System in Fort Myers, FL is the largest network of medical care facilities in Southwest Florida and is highly respected for its expertise, innovation and quality of care. For nearly a century, we’ve been providing our community with everything from primary care treatment to highly specialized care services and robotic assisted surgeries.
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