Hand surgeon wants to ensure the only blood you see this Halloween is fake

Macabre scenes and haunted hospitals are all in good fun for Halloween – but no one wants to end up in the actual hospital for the holiday. 

Fernando Herrera, M.D., a plastic surgeon board certified in hand surgery, said he and his colleagues see an uptick in patients around the holidays when pumpkin carving goes wrong. 

“People lacerate tendons or cut themselves – sometimes minor, sometimes pretty bad,” he said. 

In one case he saw, a woman was holding the pumpkin on the inside to steady it and carving on the outside. When the knife plunged through the shell, it punctured her finger. The injury looked innocuous enough, but the woman had actually sliced through both tendons, a nerve and an artery on one side. 

“It’s a pretty serious injury,” Herrera said. “It’s not only fixing it, but the recovery. The recovery can be long and difficult, because you’re not able to use your hand well for a while, and you’ve got to do rehab for eight weeks.”

He’s also seen children with burns because they reached into a jack-o-lantern to grab the candle. 

Herrera offered several tips for safe pumpkin carving.

• Make sure your carving area is well lit and all your tools are clean and dry. Pumpkins are already slick with pumpkin goo; you don’t want to add a slippery carving tool to the mix. 
• Use a pumpkin carving kit. The tools in these kits usually have serrated blades for sawing and dull tips. This is definitely a case of “do as I say and not as I do,” as Herrera recalls his early teen years, wielding the sharpest kitchen knife he could find. For pumpkin carving, though, sharper isn’t necessarily better. Sharp kitchen knives can get stuck in the thick pumpkin shell, then suddenly break through, potentially injuring whatever body part is on the other side. 
• Kids design; adults carve. Let your kids have the fun of coming up with the pumpkin design, but adults should do the actual carving. If you’re ready to let your teens or older children do the carving, make sure to provide adult supervision. 

Quickly following on the heels of Halloween are Thanksgiving and Christmas, and Herrera noted he sees injuries during those holidays as well. Be careful when washing delicate wine glasses, he said. He’s seen lacerations when a glass shattered in someone’s hand while being washed. When carving a turkey, make sure the knife is sharp and you’re not cutting toward yourself. Use proper precautions when using a ladder to hang lights, as a fall can result in a broken wrist or worse.