Halloween scares up many hand injuries

If you value your fingers, be careful as you carve up the household jack-o’-lantern. One slip of the knife and you could wind up in the hospital with “Halloween hand.”

During October and November 2013, more than half of the estimated 4,400 Halloween-related injuries involved pumpkin carving, the Consumer Product Safety Commission reported.

The injuries ranged from minor cuts to major lacerations across the palm that sever tendons, nerves and blood vessels, said Asif M. Ilyas, a hand surgeon at Philadelphia’s Rothman Institute. Ilyas sees several Halloween injuries a year, including knives that go “through and through,” sticking out of the hand, and even amputated fingers.

“It can be pretty bloody and messy,” Ilyas said, adding that the hand is highly vascular and that patients were often shocked by the amount of blood from their injuries. “Even a small cut can bleed a lot.”

It is often the nondominant hand — the one without the knife — that is injured, Ilyas said. “It’s like bagel injuries, except they are using much bigger knives.”

The typical Halloweenhand patient tends to be a mother who is helping her kids carve up a pumpkin. Less common but still related to the holiday are the injuries to hands and limbs that happen when firecrackers for pyrotechnic displays blow up. Those patients tend to be male, Ilyas said.

A 2010 study from the journal Pediatrics found that finger and hand wounds accounted for 17.6 percent of all injuries on Halloween among children under 19.