Surgeons save three fingers of boy injured in fireworks accident

MOORESVILLE, Ind. – Just days before July 4, 2023, 16-year-old Isaac Depoy and a few friends found a box of fireworks in a barn on the teen’s parents’ property in Mooresville.

“And we thought, ‘Let’s set off some fireworks,'” Isaac recalled. “Seemed like a good idea.”

Isaac had lit over two dozen fireworks, had only three left, and had taken precautions to protect himself when a defective device with a slipped fuse exploded prematurely.

“I just feel an explosion and wake up. My hand is torn to shreds, there is no smoke coming out and I’m just bleeding,” he said. “When I came to, I saw that my middle finger was broken and bleeding.”

Three fingers of his left hand were left as bones, the skin torn off, when Isaac ran to a neighbor’s house for help.

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

As it turned out, Isaac would survive, although it was not known whether he would have only seven or ten fingers.

“This is the kind of injury you might see on a battlefield,” said Dr. Gregory Borschel, chief of plastic surgery at Riley Hospital for Children. “The easiest and quickest thing to do would be to amputate those fingers, but the deficit that would be left behind is pretty bad, especially for a boy in his late teens, that’s a big problem.”

Instead, Dr. Borschel proposed an alternative path that would allow Isaac’s body to heal itself. He would do this by peeling off a layer of skin on the side of the teenager’s midsection, putting his hand inside the flap, and sewing it back shut for a month.

“Imagine we make a big incision here, lift all the tissue, then take his hand and split it like this, cover all the exposed bone, wrap it around so the tissue covers all the exposed bone, and then sew it in place,” Dr. Borschel described. “What has to happen is that the flap is lifted, we surgically attach it, and then his own body, the blood vessels have to grow from his hand into the flap, and when the blood supply is adequate, which usually takes a couple of weeks, we go back into the OR in a second step and split the flap.”

After Isaac’s hand was removed from his side, his fingers were swollen like lobster claws, but after 13 surgeries, the teenager has regained more mobility and feeling in his damaged fingers.

“When I shovel, I have to get a grip. Because I use it a lot, I learned to bend it and basically had to relearn everything I did with my left hand,” Isaac said. “When I shoot with a bow or something like that, I don’t have a problem with it because I’m so used to it now because I’ve been working on it for a year.”

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

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

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