As promised, here is an account of an event that could only happen in the Canadian Arctic.

I received a call from one of the more remote hamlets and the nurse told me that a man had accidentally cut off a good part of his left thumb with a mitre saw. He was bleeding pretty badly, but the nurse knew quite well how to stop that.

After the bleeding was under control, she contacted me to get authorization to fly the patient out to Winnipeg to see a plastic surgeon.

Normally, the procedure is that I contact the surgeon on call and discuss the problem. If the specialist will accept the further care for the patient, then we make travel arrangements.

Before I placed the call, I asked what had happened to the part of the thumb that was cut off. It was still at the place where the accident had happened. The cut was pretty clean and therefore the missing part would also have a smooth surface, making it possible to re-attach the thumb.

Everything in that hamlet is within minutes from the health centre, so I asked them to retrieve the cut-off part, rinse it in saline, and when clear of sawdust and dirt to put it in a jar with saline and then wrap the jar in ice and to ship it with the patient to Winnipeg.

The plastic surgeon was most receptive and provided clear instructions where the patient was to present himself upon arrival.

There happened to be a scheduled flight leaving fairly soon to Winnipeg and since the patient would not need medical attention other than pain control during the flight, we booked him for that journey.

He received an injection for pain and a small supply of painkilling tablets to be used during the five-hour trip to the university hospital in Winnipeg.

Of course he was to take the missing thumb securely packed in ice with him.

The trip from the hamlet to the airstrip is about 10 kilometers on a gravel road and off he went with the local taxi/ambulance/hearse that ferries any passengers to and from the airstrip to the hamlet.

The patient got on the plane and landed in Rankin Inlet for refueling. That is when he discovered that he had left the package with the thumb at the airstrip in the waiting room at his home community.

Great panic!

He called back to the health centre and told them the story. As luck would have it, there was another plane delivering cargo and passengers that afternoon and the thumb became a precious “passenger” to be re-united with his owner in Churchill, another stop on the way to Winnipeg.

From there the patient and the thumb traveled together to their destination. All went well from that point on and the thumb was re-attached successfully since the surgeon thought the piece was still viable, having been kept cool all the way.

The patient had to stay in Winnipeg for after-care to make sure that the graft would take.

Being that far from home and never been out of Nunavut the sudden transfer to “the big city” can be rather intimidating.

The government has built and Inuit centre in Winnipeg where people like him, who do not need hospitalization, but yet require ongoing specialized care, can stay at no cost to them. There are always quite a few Inuit from all over the Kivalliq who are staying there for their medical investigations or recovering from day-care surgery before returning home. There they are sheltered and very well looked after. The management arranges for appointments, Inuktitut/English translators and transportation to the various specialists.

When I spoke with the nurse after all this, we suspected that this must have been the first time in history that someone left his thumb at home.

Moral of the story: never leave home without your severed parts.