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
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