Cambridge Bay man's frostbitten hands to be amputated next week

Romeo Tucci, a Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, man who was lost for six hours in a blizzard, has lost the battle to save his hands from severe frostbite.

• Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, man fears amputation after developing severe frostbite

Christina Tucci, Romeo's sister, posted on a GoFundMe page earlier this week that an amputation has been scheduled for April 5 in Edmonton, where he is being treated at the University of Alberta Hospital. 

After Tucci found his way back to the community, he was taken to the health centre, where he was treated and released. It was three weeks before he was sent to Edmonton for further treatment — something that Nunavut's chief of medical staff, Dr. Sandy McDonald, says is standard procedure.

"The thing about frostbite is, the damage is done right at the start," says McDonald. 

"If you had severe pneumonia and couldn't breathe, we'd fly you to Ottawa. We do it all the time. Why don't we do it with frostbite? It's only because they can't do anything more in the big centres in the early days of the frostbite, until they know how severe it is."

'The treatment's the same whether you're in Edmonton or in Cambridge Bay'

McDonald says that once a patient has been diagnosed with moderate or severe frostbite, community health officials begin treatment by re-warming the patient's frozen limbs. In Nunavut, that's often followed by a call to a specialist — usually a surgeon in the territory or in a larger centre like Winnipeg. 

"The advice tends to go like this," says McDonald.

"The first thing is to rewarm it, it's to bring the tissue back up to normal temperature. And the second thing is to protect the area, because you don't want any further damage to take place."

Even in severe cases like Tucci's, early treatment for frostbite is typically anti-inflammatory medication such as ibuprofen, which McDonald says is available in all Nunavut health centres.

"There's one possible option to help, and that's thrombolysis," he says. "Clot busting medication. People who have heart attacks get it. It can be used in some cases of frostbite, but it's only on the advice of the experts. We can do thrombolysis here."

McDonald didn't speak directly to Tucci's case, but says that specialists — usually plastic surgeons — will decide when to send a patient south, usually once it has become clear that amputation is the only option. It can take days or weeks before it's clear what affected tissue will recover, and what will need to be removed. 

"The treatment's the same whether you're in Edmonton or in Cambridge Bay," he said. 

"So rather than having someone going and sitting around at the boarding home in Ottawa doing nothing... keep them home.

"We get regular consultation with the experts, and when they think it's the time, we send them out."