Megan Cullen/FacebookA woman suffering with chronic pain in her fingers successfully pulled off a home operation to remove the sore digit – and threw away the appendage.
Megan Cullen, 25, from County Cork, Ireland, has had agonising pain in her right index finger and decided, after years of requesting doctors relieve her, to conduct her own DIY amputation.
She’d suffered through two failed surgeries since jamming the finger in a car door eight years ago. Recently, she came to the end of her pain threshold and took matter into her now nine-digit hands.
Speaking to Neil Prendeville’s radio show on Red FM, the full-time carer said:
I planned it for about a week. I’m not saying exactly how I did it because I don’t want people copying it.
I tied a tourniquet again. I made sure the thing I used was Dettolled, I was Dettolled. I took it off. I screamed. I called for my mother to call an ambulance.
I threw the finger away so the [paramedics] couldn’t grab it and try sew it back on again at the Cork University Hospital.
She’d previously tried to remove the finger with an axe, which didn’t work, FYI.
Of the successful DIY amputation, Megan recalled doctors were amazed:
They don’t know how I did such a clean cut. I got rid of it. I threw it in the bin. I made sure it was nowhere to be seen.
I sat there and had a fag. Mam was like ‘Are you okay?’ And I said ‘I have no pain’. We just sat there and chatted, the ambulance came, I was brought to CUH and ever since I’ve been brilliant.
I have a little bit of pain – obviously I chopped off my own finger so it’s not painless but I’m not on painkillers.
She’s now free of her cocktail of morphine and happy as a clam but wants to know why doctors ignored her requests for removal, she claims.
Either way, high-four for being so brave.
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A former emo kid who talks too much about 8Chan meme culture, the Kardashian Klan, and how her smartphone is probably killing her. Francesca is a Cardiff University Journalism Masters grad who has done words for BBC, ELLE, The Debrief, DAZED, an art magazine you’ve never heard of and a feminist zine which never went to print.