The injury looked small: a crushed left index finger and thumb, cleaned in surgery. About 12 hours after the operation, the 43-year-old man began having chest tightness with exertion. Within a day of reaching the hospital, he was struggling to breathe and on a ventilator.
When doctors washed fluid from his lungs, it contained floating droplets of fat. The diagnosis was fat embolism syndrome, a condition doctors typically associate with broken thighbones and other major fractures.
