I’m in my second finger injury requiring a splint for months.
The first time I cut a tendon at work and needed to wear a splint for three months while it grew back together. Pretty amazing in my mind.
Now I have a mallet deformation and need to wear a splint for two months while my tendon reattaches to the bone if I’m understanding it correctly.
How do they find each other? How do they specifically know where they need to go amongst all the other stuff in your body?
In: Biology
When you have a serious bone injury, first a blood clot forms around the damaged tissue (living bone is considered “tissue”). Next, special cells inside the clot, called phagocytes, start basically eating or dissolving little bits of damaged bone, bits of dead tissue, and any bacteria or other invaders that may have entered the injury (if your skin was broken).
Next, another type of special cells, called chondroblasts, start forming a layer of mostly collagen around the damaged tissue. This process could take days or weeks, depending on the severity of the damage, your age, how well your immune system id functioning, etc.
Once that collagen patch is fully formed, a third type of cells, called osteoblasts, come in and start replacing the collagen with minerals, thereby forming new bone over the damaged area.
Then there’s a final stage where cells called osteoclasts break down any excess bone that may have formed around the damaged area. The idea is to restore the bone to its original shape/form, but if there’s a severe fracture that isn’t set properly, and the ends of the broken bone aren’t aligned properly, you can end up with excess bone growth as your body works to join those two ends back together.
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