Trauma Surgery
Expert Trauma Reconstruction
Trauma happens when you least expect it, requiring trauma surgery. Our surgeons work with area trauma centers and are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Trauma can range from significant accidents or it can be less severe repairs to the face, hands and limbs. Often this involves a team of experts, working to give you the best care.
Traumatic Injuries
Accidents are the number one cause of trauma that requires surgical intervention. Head and neck trauma can be caused by car accidents, dog bites and other unexpected injuries. Vehicle and ATV accidents can involve fractures of the face that require surgery to realign bones, skin, and teeth to restore both function and appearance. Dog bites can cause significant soft tissue injury that involve complex closures to ensure that features like lips still function properly to eat and talk, or eyelids that close without excess scarring. A less common injury is gunshot wounds, which is often life altering and requires complicated repairs of major structures in the face and head.
Trunk and lower extremity trauma can include injuries from falls off of ladders, high machinery or roofs. Motorcycles are another common source of trauma, as they often involve things like gravel and loss of skin or broken bones. We work in conjunction with regional orthopedic surgeons, as a team to treat these wounds. Explosions from tires, factory machinery and combustibles like fireworks are a few more traumas that can injure the trunk and legs, causing possible burns, cuts or muscle defects.
Hands are complex and when a trauma happens to one or both of them, your surgeon has had specialized training to restore the most function possible during trauma surgery. This can be from physical altercations, breaking delicate bones that need to be stabilized. Another common way to injure your hands is with power saws or knives. When a knife or saw slips and cuts a finger, this can damage nerves, blood vessels or tendons that help bend or straighten your hands or fingers. Crush injuries between two objects, such as boat and trailer or table saw injures are also often treated by our surgeons. With most hand injuries, you will also be working a specialized therapist as well to best help restore function after your surgery is completed and you are healed.
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Emergency Surgical Treatment
Immediate surgical treatment is necessary when there is a severe crush injury, open fractures, large contaminated wounds, or when an artery has been injured.
Hand Trauma
Trauma to the hand is a common occurrence both at work and in the home. Injuries range from simple skin wounds to large crush injuries, de-gloving injuries (skin peeled back), and amputations. In some cases seemingly insignificant skin wounds mask deeper injuries to the tendon, nerve, or vascular structures.
Isolated Tendon and Nerve Injuries
Most isolated tendon and nerve injuries can be treated as non-emergencies. In many cases our physicians will ask the referring physician to close the skin wounds and schedule surgery within three to ten days.