LINCOLN, Maine — Doctors at a Boston hospital successfully reattached the left ring finger of a Lincoln teenager after it was completely severed in a table saw accident at Mattanawcook Academy, the boy’s parents said Wednesday.
Cameron Fournier, 16, was sitting up in bed, his hand elevated above his heart and heavily bandaged, on Wednesday at Boston Children’s Hospital. His mother, Ann Fournier, said that he will remain there for five days “to ensure that the finger stays viable.”
“Considering what could have happened, we are very happy with that news for sure,” Fournier said after her son’s eight-hour procedure that began about 6 p.m. Tuesday, the same day the accident occurred. “[The surgeons] were very confident that they were going to be able to reattach the finger, but they said that it was going to be a long surgery.”
The sophomore also lost the tip of his left pinky finger and suffered nerve damage to his left thumb in the accident, which occurred in a woodworking class of 14 students. Doctors are hopeful that the nerve damage will heal, but Cameron Fournier might suffer some numbness to his thumb, she said.
Fournier said the accident occurred so quickly that his classmates told him what happened before he knew it.
“I was cutting wood, and the wood got caught in between the blade guard and the blade. It caught the wood and shot it back out. I went to push the wood back in, and my finger hit the blade,” Fournier said by telephone. “I didn’t even realize that it happened at first. I looked at my friends and saw that they had their hands over their faces. They told me to look at my hand, and I saw that there was blood.”
Technology education teacher Thomas Vicaire immediately grabbed a bunch of paper towels and wrapped them around the severed finger. He went to the classroom telephone and told main office personnel to call 911 and then wrapped more paper towels around Fournier’s hand, Fournier said.
“I just sat there in my chair,” Fournier said.
“The principal said he was the calmest one in the room when he got there,” Ann Fournier said. “That’s typical Cameron. He has always handled accidents well. He has had a few. He doesn’t get too excited about stuff.”
Mattanawcook Academy football coach Bill McCarthy also arrived, helping put ice on Cameron Fournier’s hand and on the severed finger, RSU 67 Superintendent Keith Laser said. A Lincoln-East Millinocket ambulance took Fournier to Penobscot Valley Hospital before a LifeFlight helicopter flew him to Boston.
A hairdresser, Ann Fournier was at work when school workers telephoned with the news. She arrived at Penobscot Valley Hospital as doctors prepared her son for the flight to the hospital, and her nephew, Zachary Briggs, drove her to Boston.
The call “kind of threw me for a loop,” Fournier said, but she was impressed with how quickly and smoothly Penobscot Valley Hospital staff handled the accident.
“The doctors were amazing in terms of getting everybody on the same page as far as where we wanted him to go,” she said.
Al Fournier, Cameron Fournier’s father, was at work as a welding shop general foreman in Kuparuk, Alaska, when he heard of the accident. He was set to head home to Lincoln the next day.
“I get a lot of frequent flier miles,” he said.
He got off his connecting flight at Boston’s Logan Airport on Wednesday to be with his son, he said.
“He looks good. He just had a bowl of Jell-O,” Al Fournier said of his son.
School officials, meanwhile, continue to investigate the accident. Laser said he contacted the school’s insurer and will be contacting industrial arts program administrators at the Maine Department of Education for instructions or advice.
Laser praised staffers, particularly Vicaire, for handling the accident quickly and adroitly.
“It was a team effort of the folks in the school to take care of the situation,” Laser said. “I am proud of the way they responded.”
His review will include determining whether safety procedures need to be revised or new equipment purchased to prevent further accidents, Laser said.
Family friend Beth Martin of Lincoln said that she has set up a gofundme.com page dedicated to raising money to help defray the Fourniers’ travel and lodging expenses, plus any bills not covered by their medical insurance. As of 3 p.m. Wednesday, the page had received $350 in donations.
“They’re a great family. They would do the same for any family in our community,” Martin said. “I don’t know what the hospital has available [for help]. I am sure that [their expenses] will be well over a couple hundred dollars a day.”
High school officials told Laser that the accident was the first in the woodworking shop in at least 30 years, the RSU 67 superintendent said Tuesday.
Each year about 67,000 people in the U.S. are injured by table saws, with about 33,000 being treated in emergency rooms, according to the consumer organization Fairwarning.org. There are about 4,000 amputations from table saws annually, according to the organization.