An American surgeon has revealed some of the most odd items he’s removed from people’s fingers.

Urchin spines, fishhooks and bullets are just some of the things Nick Pappas has seen in his 10 years working as an orthopaedic surgeon.

The 43-year-old hand specialist spends his working day removing foreign objects, inserting metal plates and re-attaching fingers.

‘Now and then something will surprise me’, Nick, from Louisiana, said.

He added: ‘I had one guy with a snake bite, which can make the whole hand swell up like a balloon.

‘He’d killed the snake after it attacked him and all the nurses were freaking out because the guy had a snake bite, the container and the dead snake which he’d brought with him.

‘Another one is the high-pressure paint injuries when someone sprays paint with a high-pressure gun.’

Nick has also had to deal with gunshot wounds in the past – and has removed fragments which are still inside the bone.

Nick Pappas has made a variety of interesting extractions (Picture: SWNS)

But while some may think his job is all about taking things out of people’s hands, – it’s also about putting things in them too.

‘Sometimes when we take a bone out, we replace it with a patient’s own tissue or sometimes I replace a joint with silicone,’ Nick said.

‘I also put in little pins, metal plates, silicone implants and if someone ruptures a tendon, we put little anchors in and we tie a suture around the tendon – I did one of those a couple of weeks ago.

‘Some of the devices we put in allow people to start using the limbs straight away, so technology has come a long way.’

Most of his surgery takes 30 minutes but Nick said finger amputations and re-attachments can be ‘challenging and time consuming’.

He said: ‘I did one where I replaces someone’s thumb with their big toe.

‘It took 12 hours and can be very tricky because the size doesn’t always match up.

‘If you mess it up and the blood vessels don’t work properly then it can lead to a bad outcome.

Nick has always had a special touch when it comes to fixing fingers (Picture: Nick Pappas/SWNS)

‘Thankfully, this one was successful.

‘That was probably the most challenging. To take one part of the body and move it somewhere else.

‘I also had one that was done from a Samurai sword that took off three of his fingers and it took 10 hours to re-attach all the nerves, the tendons and the bones.’

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Urchin spines, fishhooks and bullets are among the odd items.