The Most Challenging Reconstructive Procedure for God: Fingertip Reconstruction

We presented 59 fingertip injury cases that we treated and followed up. Among the 59 patients, 50 were male and 9 were female. The methods we chose for reconstruction were as follows: repairing by a skin graft (n:3), a V-Y advancement flap (n:17), a cross-finger flap (n:19), a thenar flap (n:5), an abdominal interpolation flap (n:8) and infraclavicular flap (n:2). We performed 35 operations under local anesthesia and 24 under general anesthesia. The waiting time for the second séance of the interpolation flaps was not longer than 12 days for all cases, and we performed the shortest flap separating operation at the end of the seventh day. Since their fingers healed, the patients had no complaints about the donor area. In this study, we did not evaluate the two-point discrimination. Flap-thinning operations were required later, for the abdominal interpolation performed cases. None of the patients had hypersensitivity against touching or cold. From this study it is concluded that regardless of the preferred fingertip repairing method, the evaluation of the finger profile view should not be neglected. It is important to obtain a profile view of repaired fingers similar to that of healthy fingers, and we believe that the pulp softness should be maintained. Although there is a continuous tendency to describe technically complicated and detailed reconstruction methods in literature, we feel the need to emphasize that the classical methods have not lost the value if they are carried out properly.