'My thumb is a big toe - so I need a larger glove'

When cobbler David Lee's thumb was sliced off while he trimmed the heel of a shoe in his shop in 2019, he would have been forgiven for thinking his life would never be the same again.

Despite being placed on ice, the digit was too damaged to be reattached by specialist surgeons.

"I didn't realise how bad it was, and then my thumb just dropped to the floor - I was like 'right, that's gone'," he said.

Instead, Lee's big toe was identified as a replacement - and now more than five years on, and with months of physiotherapy and years of adapting his habits, he said the most drastic change in his life was he now needed to buy bigger gloves.

Lee said he had been working in his shop, in Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, when his jumper became entangled in machinery and dragged him in.

"Right under my foot I've got an emergency stop button which I pressed," Lee said. "I thought 'oh this hurts a bit', but I unravelled my jumper and my thumb just drops.

"Emotionally I switched off. Instantly I shouted somebody 'can you just ring me an ambulance please?' And they thought i was joking because I mess about at work."

He was driven to King's Mill Hospital - while holding his severed thumb in a bag of ice "but not looking at it" - and then transferred on to the Royal Derby Hospital's specialist Pulvertaft Hand Centre.

Lee said: "They gave me the options of what they could do going forward. One was to stitch my hand into my hip and let the skin regrow, but if they did that it was going to be months and months for recovery and I didn't like the sound of that."

Surgeons instead removed Lee's right big toe - and he said: "Looking at it now, you wouldn't know."

But it was not an easy process, with him back before medics "literally every single week" before healing enough to be passed to the physiotherapists.

Lee said: "To start with, I couldn't actually use the hand so everything I was doing was left-handed - and I'm not ambidextrous.

"Trying to just pick up a spoon and put coffee and sugar in a cup with your left hand when you're not used to it was so challenging.

"I was trying to use the fingers on my right hand to make a pincer, but there was no power and no grip in the hand because obviously I'd had this major surgery and internally, your muscles have been ripped apart."

While the use of the hand began to return and Lee able to return to his shop at the Idlewells Shopping Centre, building grip strength was the first hurdle - with him not able to carry out mundane tasks.

Slowly with practice, the power returned, although he began to notice other adaptations with a bigger, less mobile, thumb.

Lee could use scissors, for example, but his thumb would no longer pass through the handle fully - and when he returned to riding his bicycle, his old gloves no longer fitted with the new thumb.

He also stopped using cash, as he was worried people might notice his hand while passing notes or coins.

"I went through a phase," he said. "Maybe people do notice it, [but] no-one has ever said anything to me.

"But now I've got to the stage where, you know what? It's a part of me and I just don't care."

As well as living with a new thumb, he was also noticing the surgery had impacted his foot as well.

He said: "I'm stood up all day, so towards the end of the day my foot starts to get painful and sore.

"By the end of the week, I'm like 'this is getting pretty tender now'. It's kind of something that I've got to put up with and live with."

On Thursday, Lee was reunited at BBC Radio Derby with Jill Arrowsmith, the surgeon who carried out his "life-changing" operations.

Arrowsmith said: "We so take all parts of our body for granted, but especially our hands - they're such an important part of your life.

"They're how you make your living, they're how you interact with other people, they're how you show emotions, and then when you have an injury and you suddenly can't do that, you lose everything.

"It's a huge impact on people."

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