*THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS GRAPHIC PHOTOS*
A 22-YEAR-OLD woman has told how she attempted to amputate her own finger with an axe.
Speaking to Joe Duffy on Liveline today, Megan Cullen explained that her experience of chronic pain led her to take drastic action.
Megan slammed her finger in a car door four years ago and has suffered chronic pain in her finger ever since. She said that the pain is so agonising, and she felt like she wasn’t being heard by doctors, that she attempted to amputate her own finger with an axe.
She told Duffy:
“It’s a bit like a cramp in your leg that never goes away and you keep getting spasms. The pain is 20 times worse than you can imagine.”
She said that she was told her finger had been crushed and would take a year to heal. However, nothing worked and when she bent it, the skin split.
The pain often kept Megan awake.
However, an operation in November led to complications and her finger “felt detached”.
Exasperated, she looked up steps on YouTube of how to go about cutting her finger off with an axe.
I realised I can still do my job and things around the house [without the finger], so I said I’m going to take an axe to it. I googled how to do it.
She said that the pain and the fact that she couldn’t get air, water or heat on the finger led her to believe that amputation was a better option.
“I thought getting it off would make the pain go away. I’d have pain getting it off, but at least there’d be an end to it.
“But right now, there is no end.”
RTÉ Radio 1 / SoundCloud
Following a viewing of the video, Megan says she hit her finger with the axe, but it rebounded off the wire which had been placed there in November.
I was taken to A&E and they gave out to me, but I said that nobody is listening to me, I can’t sleep.
“The doctor patched me up and eventually said he understands why I did it.
“I went to my doctor and her gave me Valium, but it worked once. I decided “right I’ll google what to do again”.
There, Megan found that if she tied a tourniquet around her finger for four hours, the finger would die and have to be removed. She left the tourniquet on for seven hours and the finger didn’t die. She decided to place the tourniquet on the finger again.
She says that she accepts that what she’s doing is unusual, but says that life with the pain is not worth it.
She told the show that she was due to have another operation in seven weeks.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say