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Leg wound healing

ShadeZ

Maester
Without magic being involved and with a normal human (albeit a 7-9ft one) could they heal if the back of their lower leg were cut open across the muscle grains or would this be a permanently crippling wound?
 

CupofJoe

Myth Weaver
I would imagine that any deep [or even not so deep] wound across the muscle would limit its useability after healing.
 

pmmg

Myth Weaver
I got a tiny wound on my thumb, only a fraction on an inch and there is still a numb spot around it many years later. Must have been nerve damage. I would imagine any real wound might have similar effects.
 

ladyander

Scribe
I would assume that it would cause issues. Scar tissue will form because that's how your body can repair itself. However, a lot of scar tissue is bad. Usually they perform surgeries to minimize scar tissue because it can affect motion and one's flexibility. On a surface level, the scar itself will have no feeling. I've two long surgical scars on my ankle. I can't feel anything along those scars because the nerves in my skin were cuts when they repaired the bone.

Now could this be crippling, it could be. I suppose it depends on the person and how bad the scar tissue is.
 

Mad Swede

Auror
Without magic being involved and with a normal human (albeit a 7-9ft one) could they heal if the back of their lower leg were cut open across the muscle grains or would this be a permanently crippling wound?
Yes, the wound would heal over but they might never walk properly again. It depends how deep the cut is. Either way, healing would take time, and during that time the muscles would waste away. You might be able to build them up again, but that would take even more time. You're talking months of recovery time if the character is to regain full muscle strength after a deep cut like that.
 
What is the level of medical knowledge and care given in this situation?

As someone who had a wound in this ballpark, I can say that you can fix it. I tore my Achilles tendon right through, and though that was completely internal, doing so very much makes it hard to walk. If you catch it fast enough you can, with correct footplacement and fixing it in place heal most of it in such a way that you can walk again. You basically fixate the thing in place and wait until scar tissue grows enough to hold it in place. A better solution is to cut open your leg, sow the two parts back together and close the thing up again.

From experience I can say that doing so gives you back close to complete functionality in your leg, though to get there is a 6-12 month recovery period.

Also, if my biological knowledge is accurate enough then tendons are more the issue than muscles. Muscles grow back better than tendons.

The thing is though that this very much all depends on 20th century knowledge of medicin. If I'd done the same thing 50 or 100 years earlier I'd probably be limping for the rest of my life.
 

Queshire

Auror
Hmmm... I'm not an expert, but I want to say that it'd likely be fine.

My two biggest concerns with an injury like that would be hitting an important artery/vein and infection. Since we're talking about them healing afterwards they clearly managed to avoid or overcome both of those.

Next is concern over damage to the various fiddly bits of the body. For a leg I'd say that'd be the tendons, joints and maybe nerves?

Cutting the back of the lower leg sounds like it'd be too high to hit the Achilles tendon and two low to affect the knee. I'm less sure about nerves, but I do know that your hands have one of the highest concentration of nerves in the body (because, ya know, you use them so often to touch stuff) so it'd be harder to cause nerve damage to the leg.

I don't think it'd be permanently crippling. Maybe have it ache in the rain or the cold or something? But still, if all muscle wounds were crippling then we wouldn't have the classic image of the badass, battle scarred warrior.
 
If you catch it fast enough you can, with correct footplacement and fixing it in place heal most of it in such a way that you can walk again. You basically fixate the thing in place and wait until scar tissue grows enough to hold it in place. A better solution is to cut open your leg, sow the two parts back together and close the thing up again.

The thing is though that this very much all depends on 20th century knowledge of medicin. If I'd done the same thing 50 or 100 years earlier I'd probably be limping for the rest of my life.
The surgical method would require a level of anesthesia and operating room technology not seen before the twentieth century to do it safely, but at least in theory, the correct foot placement and fixing it in place could be done at the pre-modern level. What it would take is a practitioner with great skill at manipulating the human body and knowledge of how to do it. Such things have existed for millennia. Practitioners of the past could develop an uncanny (to us) sense of how to do it all by feel. That's an art that's lost when we have x-rays and other imaging technology to rely on.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
It definitely could be done.
streckung1-14B9AE829527B3B5B2A.jpg

but, ow!

And here's one cauterizing a wound
upload_2022-6-24_13-37-6.png
 

Queshire

Auror
Makes me think of all those "Humans are Space Orcs" things on Youtube and such. We are a lot better and bouncing back from injuries than a lot of species out there after all.
 

ThinkerX

Myth Weaver
I slipped and dislocated my knee right before I turned twenty. Took months before I could walk normally, and I felt the twinge for years afterward. On the bright side, the knee pain was air pressure sensitive, so I could kind of sort of predict the onset or end or rain.
 
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