what happens to a severed finger on a cellular level immediately following amputation?
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You’re cells are on borrowed time.
When your finger gets severed, nothing much happens to the finger beyond no new food is coming in and no waste is leaving. Your cells are unthinking machines and they will happily keep on doing the same things they were planning on doing. The biggest thing is that your blood cells will stop moving since there’s no more pulse to push them.
Since most of your cells will have plenty of food to last them a while, the biggest problems are no more waste removal and no more O2. This means that they will all die within about an hour. The reason you want that finger on ice is it will slow down all of those cellular processes, decreasing the rate the O2 is used up, and slowing down waste buildup.
Once the finger is (hopefully) reattached, the cells that didn’t make it get replaced and the waste gets removed
Immediately? The cells continue to do their thing, working towards the common good even though there doesn’t seem to be any commands coming down the neuron message tube. There’s also a very concerning loss of blood pressure.
The hair continues to grow. The skin keeps splitting and making new skin. The immune system in the area starts to fight off the influx of germs. Some messengers runs off to a lymph node to call for reinforcements, but they never make it. The fingertips continue sending the nerve messages up the line how cold the floor is. But no one is listening.
Cell death happens within hours when they run out of oxygen since there’s no more blood supplying them. They can’t burn their ATP energy to do their work (like sustaining themselves) and they effectively suffocate.
Pathologist here:
If you leave the wound open, and assuming the majority of bleeding is stopped somehow, The process of wound healing will begin by “secondary intention”. There are roughly two separate but intertwined processes at work with this. 1. The clotting of blood at the surface will attract fibroblasts (makes collagen/scars) and new vessels, collectively called “granulation tissue” (the soil). This will make a suitable surface for the second process which 2. Involves the slow March of dividing “basal” skin cells from surrounding skin to cover the wound surface ~1 mm a day (the seeds). These basal cells will divide/grow to become your multilayered skin and will also divide to continue filling the gap/wound until closed.
Side note: when getting an open wound checked, the doctor will often say everything looks great, while to the lay-person it’s this stippled red-white-sometimes light yellow weepy gross looking surface. That funny stippled surface is called granulation tissue. The unpigmented border of light colored skin at the edges is the heaped up edges of skin actively dividing to cross/close the gap.
Not included here is information on bone healing, which has its own nuances.
Nothing. Literally nothing happens immediately after. Seriously who asks these questions? Did you mean an hour after ?
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