http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/09/09/pinky.regeneration.surgery/index.html?hpt=C1(CNN) -- After running inside from a rainstorm one Friday evening last January, Deepa Kulkarni leaned against the doorway with her right hand to take off her boots. Then, in an effort to make sure the dog didn't get out, someone slammed the door hard, and it landed right on her pinky.
Kulkarni thought the door had only bruised her finger, but then she looked down and saw the tip of her pinky lying on the floor.
"I swooped down and picked it up before the dog got it," she remembers. "At first I was fine, but then I saw the blood -- there was so much blood -- and I felt woozy."
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'100 percent chance of failure'
"The doctor who was on call at the emergency room told me there was no way he could reattach my pinky," she says. "I didn't like that, so I asked to see a specialist."
An orthopedic surgeon concurred with the ER doctor, and made an additional recommendation: He'd have to amputate even more of the finger so it would heal properly.
"I was like, no way, with so much technology out there, there must be some other way to do this," she said. "But he said he wouldn't even attempt to reattach it. He said was there was a 100 percent chance of failure," she remembers.
Seven weeks later, a new pinky
Eventually, Kulkarni made an appointment with Dr. Michael Peterson, an orthopedic surgeon in Davis. At first, Kulkarni says he was hesitant to try tissue regeneration since he hadn't done it before, but she gave him some research materials, and she says eventually he agreed to try it.
The therapy involved cleaning out the finger and removing scar tissue -- a process called debridement -- and then dipping her finger into MatriStem wound powder. After seven weeks of treatment, her fingertip grew back (as shown in the before and after photos above).
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