Boy plays guitar again after losing fingers in lawnmower accident

By Maureen Gilmer, Riley Children’s Health senior writer, mgilmer1@iuhealth.org

The accident happened in a flash. One minute the family was whole and happy, and the next, they were grappling with a traumatic injury and rushing to the nearest hospital.

The screams and shock gave way to tears and tense conversations with a team of doctors.

At the center of their concerns lay then-8-year-old Paul Warner, youngest son of Neal and Kortnee Warner and little brother to Oliver Warner.

Paul and Oliver had been kicking around a soccer ball outside their Irvington home, while Neal and Kortnee worked in the backyard. Kortnee, who thought her sons had gone inside, rounded a corner on a riding mower when the boys came crashing down in front of her.

She immediately shut off the machine but not before Paul’s left hand got caught in the blade. It was pretty clear that he would lose some, if not all, of his fingers. The index finger was barely attached. The mower blade had cut deeply into the boy’s hand, severing bones, nerves, tendons and arteries.

“IT WAS AWFUL”

The emergency medicine physician Paul first saw at an Eastside hospital close to the family’s home was doubtful that the hand could be salvaged, but Paul was rushed by ambulance to Riley Hospital for Children, where a team of specialists went to work.

“It was awful,” Kortnee says today, a year-and-a-half after the accident.

“And it’s a giant public service announcement” for lawnmower safety, she added. “The kids had never come into the yard when we were mowing, but this is definitely something we should have talked about.”

Leave it to soft-hearted Paul to try to relieve his parents’ anguish as he faced multiple surgeries and grueling therapy at Riley Hospital in the summer and fall of 2023, and on into last winter.

Kortnee recalled in a Facebook post how Paul asked her one night in the hospital if she was OK.

“I said yes and asked why,” she wrote. “He said, ‘You were kind of quiet, and I just don’t want you to feel bad that this happened to me because I know I’m going to be OK. There are all kinds of things I can do with one hand, and I might be able to do some things with my other thumb too.’”

That was in the early days when the family and the doctors didn’t know what fingers could be saved on the injured hand.

“I don’t know what I did to deserve this kid, but he’s teaching me new things about resilience every day,” Kortnee said.

BACK IN THE GAME

A lot would transpire over the next several days and months, including multiple reconstruction surgeries by Riley plastic surgeon Dr. Joshua Adkinson and hours of tedious and sometimes painful therapy for Paul.

But today, the 10-year-old is doing all the things his parents thought he might never do again -- with 8½ fingers. That includes playing guitar and video games and even rejoining his soccer team as goalie.

“Eight-and-a-half is my new favorite number,” the precocious Paul says with a smile.

He, his parents and brother sat down in the living room of their home recently to talk about the accident and about their gratitude for the Riley team and for the friends and family who have supported them in ways big and small.

At first glance, the fourth-grader’s left hand looks pretty normal. But look closely and you can see the index finger is missing entirely and the pinkie finger is half its normal size.

Dr. Sunil Tholpady did the initial surgery that first night, removing the index finger and cleaning out the wound. Dr. Adkinson would then come in to reconstruct Paul’s hand over time.

Although Paul lost his first finger at the knuckle, when Dr. Adkinson did the surgery, he cut the bone back farther to create a scoop shape, so the hand looks more natural. Additionally, he was able to graft veins from the boy’s arm to replace the damaged vessels in his hand and reconnect the main blood supply to his remaining fingers.

That was followed by additional surgeries to remove scar tissue.

Doctors told his parents that Paul is young enough that this injury shouldn’t hold him back.

“I draw strength just from watching Paul thrive in whatever he tries to do,” Neal said. “He’s a pretty persistent kid.”

That persistence has paid off, Dr. Adkinson said.

“Most kids with an injury like this are very impaired and don’t really end up using that affected hand so well in the course of normal life,” the surgeon said. “He has done significantly better than most kids his age with this kind of injury.”

SHOWING OFF HIS SKILLS

Dr. Adkinson and some of Paul’s care team saw that firsthand in November when Paul played his guitar for the group during a follow-up appointment.

The surgeon, who also plays guitar, was impressed with Paul’s performance.

“It was one of the more satisfying things I’ve seen in a long time,” he said. “Just to take a kid who had such a devastating hand injury and now he’s at the point he can play guitar, it’s pretty special.”

“Guitar is therapy for his hand and his mind, so I was really happy to see that,” Dr. Adkinson added. “It also shows that he has a lot of grit, that he’s able to push through and resume something he’s really passionate about despite this devastating injury.”

Paul, who is right-handed, had just started playing guitar before the accident. While it’s his left hand that was injured, a guitar requires two hands. As a right-handed player, he would strum with his right hand and play chords with his left. Now, he does the opposite.

“I don’t have enough fingers on my left hand to play like a G chord,” Paul said, so he adapted.

He is able to grip a pick with his thumb and middle finger on the left hand, while reaching the chords at the top of the guitar using all five fingers on his right.

At first, he didn’t think he would pick up a guitar again. He tried a ukelele left-handed, then resumed guitar lessons last January after another surgery to remove scar tissue in the hand.

“I think I’m better left-handed than right-handed,” he said, before settling in on the sofa to play and sing “Imagine,” by John Lennon.

SEWING HAND BACK TOGETHER

Seeing how far he has come makes his parents proud, of course, especially when they consider how bad things looked.

While the damage to the index and pinkie fingers was obvious, the accident had also cut off blood supply to his two middle fingers.

“Initially, we didn’t know if they were going to be able to save these two fingers because they were just getting peripheral blood flow from tiny veins, but the main artery wasn’t connected,” Kortnee said.

“They had to sew nerves back together,” she added. “The nurse said it was like sewing the ends of two pieces of hair together.”

Paul, who seems wise beyond his years, described the experience as “traumatizing” but said music helped calm him in and out of the hospital. The nurses he had on the burn unit were “phenomenal,” his mom said, as were the child life specialists who visited his room.

“We are overwhelmed by the kindness, professionalism and sensitivity of his care at Riley,” added Neal.

Paul’s story is a cautionary tale, of course, but it’s also an example of courage and commitment.

“One of the things we think about with mangled hand injuries is not just whether we can save the hand, but will it be functional? Those are two very different things,” Dr. Adkinson said.

“I was fairly confident we’d be able to save his hand, but what I didn’t know on the front end was that he and his family would be so committed to therapy. That was really the X factor,” the surgeon said.

“I knew if I could give him a good head start in the OR, he would do great. And I think Paul kind of knew what he needed to do to get a good result. He was willing to put in the hard work to get there.”

Photos submitted and by Mike Dickbernd, IU Health visual journalist, mdickbernd@iuhealth.org