Will Humphreys documents his ninth surgery to remove a plate and seven screws from his hand after a climbing accident. The surgeon removes bone growth over the hardware, clears away synovitic material, and repairs flexor tendons that the implants had damaged and split.
Questions this video answers
Ninth surgery.
Seven screws.
So that's right. This is my ninth surgery. I am not looking forward to it. But this guy, my plate and seven screws.
It's time to come out. That thing is starting to peel off and it's cutting into my flexor tendons, which could cause a tendon rupture. So I've got to preemptively get in there. So warning, this video is going to be incredibly graphic as I've got the surgeon to agree to show the surgery of them taking the plate and seven screws out. So yeah, this is surgery number nine, all tied to my mountain climbing accident. I'll put a link to that video up here, the corner and let's see what happens.
So this is your FPL tendon, as you can see it moving and right below it is the plate, but also it's essentially enveloped the entire tendon. Your FPL is split. You can see some of the fibers here kind of dragging across the plate and dragging across the actual screw beneath it. So we're going to try to get all this up over and around this and then work to get the plate freed and then we'll take a look at the other tendons next. But definitely your FPL was on its way out here. So the plate has been exposed. Here again is that massive prominence, the FPL we talked about. I also just wanted to point out some of the bone that actually has grown up and over the plate. I've been able to remove some of it, but we'll have to dig it out from around these screw holes and also chisel away some of this bone around these screws in order to get them out. Alright, so plate's been removed. The synovitic material has been taken off the tendons. Again, here's the thumb fpl. This has been tubularized. Now you can see the suture here as well as to the index finger, which you can see.
Place that there, which you can see the index under here. The index was very, very close, as was the thumb. So hopefully not too late, but hopefully that tubularization repair will also help restore some of the glide. But the plate successfully came out okay.
