Surgeons save 3 fingers of boy injured in fireworks accident

MOORESVILLE, Ind. — Just a couple of days before July, 4 2023, Isaac Depoy, 16, and a couple of friends found a box of fireworks in a barn on the property of the teenager’s parents in Mooresville.

“And we’re like, ‘Let’s go light fireworks’,” remembered Isaac. ”Seemed like a good idea.”

Isaac had set off more than two dozen fireworks, was down to his last three and had been taking precautions to protect himself when a faulty device with its fuse slipped down inside exploded prematurely.

”I just feel an explosion and wake up and my hand is mangled and there’s no smoke anymore and I’m just bleeding,” he said. “I came to and saw that my middle finger was broken and it was bleeding.”

What was left of three fingers on his left hand were protruding bones, the skin ripped away, as Isaac ran to a neighbor’s house for help.

“One of the people there had some medical training. They made what I like to call a redneck tourniquet where they took a concrete rod and a towel and they wrapped the towel around my hand and then twisted the concrete rod til it was tight,” said the teen. ”Once they got me into the ambulance I started talking to my parents and I told them that I loved them and that I would be watching over them because I didn’t know if this was going to be the end of my life or not.”

As it turns out, Isaac was going to live but it was unknown if it would be with seven or ten fingers.

”This is the kind of injury you might see in a battlefield environment,” said Dr. Gregory Borschel, Chief of Plastic Surgery at Riley Hospital for Children. ”The easiest thing to do by far, most expeditious, would be to amputate those digits, but the deficit that would remain, pretty bad, especially for a guy in his late teen years, that’s a big problem.”

Instead, Dr. Borschel pitched an alternative path that would allow Isaac’s body to heal itself by peeling back a layer of the teen’s side midsection skin, inserting his hand into the flap and sewing it back up for a month.

”If you can imagine making a big incision here, raising up all of this tissue, and then taking his hand and then splitting this like this, covering up all of these exposed bones, wrapping it around like that so the tissue is covering up all of this exposed bone and then sewing it down,” described Dr. Borschel. ”What has to happen there is, the flap is raised up, we attach it surgically and then his own body, the blood vessels have to grow in from his hand into the flap, and once the blood supply is adequate, which normally takes a few weeks, then we go back to the OR in a second stage and we divide the flap.”

Once Isaac’s hand was removed from his side the fingers were swollen up like a lobster claw, but after 13 surgeries, the teen has regained more mobility and feeling in his damaged digits.

”Whenever I shovel I have to grip so using them a lot I learned how to bend them and had to basically relearn everything I did with my left hand,” said Isaac. ”Any time I shoot a bow or something like that I have no problem with it because I’m so used to it now from working on it from a year to now.”

Johns Hopkins University estimates that every year two thousand children in the United States are injured by fireworks.

Last year Isaac Depoy was one of them and has a warning this holiday season.

”Know what you’re setting off. Know what the consequences could be before you light it off and take every precaution while still having fun,” he said. ”I just think it could be so much worse. Whenever I was in the hospital for that first week I heard stories about what had happened to other kids in the hospital and I just thought, ‘Man, it could’ve been so much worse. I could’ve been six years old and I could have half my arm gone. But instead, I’m 17 years old and I’m only missing a couple of my fingers. It could be so much worse.’”

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