Story of Healing: Tyler Delaney

Tyler Delaney: I’m Tyler, um, I was the… [laughs]

Shawn Delaney (Tyler’s father): [laughs] You’re the one with the thumb?

Tyler Delaney: When it initially happened, I thought that I lost my thumb. I thought that I wasn’t going to be able to play basketball, sports, especially play the drums. You don’t realize how much you need it until you can’t use it.

Shawn Delaney: We had just got to vacation. Tyler was out spotting for his brother while he was wakeboarding. The rope got caught in the prop of the jet ski and pulled the rope. And as it pulled the rope, it wrapped around his thumb, and pulled the end of his thumb off.

Scott Hoffer, D.O. (Orthopedic Surgery): It was kind of a 50/50 proposition. Half of the thumb had good perfusion, the other half the nerve and the blood vessel looked like that had probably been damaged beyond repair.

Shawn Delaney: When the doctor said that he was able to save it, but still wasn’t sure that it was going to stay, that everything was going to stick, they put him into the hyperbaric chamber.

Dr. Hoffer: What the hyperbarics does, is it improves the oxygenation to all the tissues, so, even though there’s not necessarily blood supply to get oxygen to those tissues so they live, by increasing the oxygen in the atmosphere, we’re improving the oxygenation in the tissues.

Shawn Delaney: Going in there and seeing it and seeing that it was clear, and that I could see him, he could see me, we could talk.

Tyler Delaney: It really helped that I could see everyone that was outside.

Christina Wilke: Just knowing that that option was out there for him and being able to let him to do it. And they knew how many treatments it would take, how long he’d need to be in there each time they did it. They did a wonderful job.

Shawn Delaney: It was a lot better than what it could have been in the big iron tube, ya know.

Tyler Delaney: Yeah

Shawn Delaney: It turned it from a more of a gray, dark dusky I think they call it, to a red, pink where you could see the blood flow through that. It gave more and more hope every day that hey, everything is going to take, everything is going to be fine. But we were 600 miles away from home, so there wasn’t an option to go down there and follow up.

Christina Wilke: But they were helpful, they were the ones that ultimately found the doctors for us up in the area.

Shawn Delaney: They found a hand center, and we would go once a week up there for a couple months.

Christina Wilke: Yeah. They were actually pretty impressed with it. They said it was the right path to take. They were impressed with the color, the look of what some had already looked at even though it was already a week and a half after he had had the surgery and been in the chambers.

Shawn Delaney: Yeah, they were definitely impressed in how far it had come in just that short amount of time. And he doesn’t have any limitations with it. Everything’s been healed, and it’ll only get better from there.

I thank Healogics, it’s a great company. I truly believe that without that chamber, he may not have his thumb right now. He’d be a completely different kid right now if it weren’t for that.