KiwiCat's updates

While we’re waiting for updates on the bigger issue, there’s time to catch up on what happened to my finger.

On my 16th birthday, I fell and dislocated a finger just two weeks before a piano exam. That story is irrelevant other than the fact that when it happened I had an eerie period of numb shock and the sense that something was wrong with my hand. That repeated this year.

So as I already mentioned, I had taken a week’s leave from work in July. At the time of booking that leave I was anticipating a nice staycation of crafting fun, but between times the house sold and we needed to pack and this seemed too good an opportunity to miss.

One of the first priorities was cleaning out my office. The transportable building in our back yard was coming with us, it wasn’t part of the sale, so it needed to be emptied, moved and the ground beneath tidied up for the new owners. We had 2 and a half months before settlement so plenty of time.

After work on the Friday we had shifted the kids back into sharing a single room and moved my desk and computer into the spare room, set up for when I went back to work. So Saturday morning I was working with the remainder, but starting with taking down the drapes. Having gotten them down I went into the house to grab a couple of boxes to hold the curtains.

Between the house and my office were three wooden stairs, then about three steps along a concrete path. It wasn’t far, and I regularly went back and forth during the day, sometimes at pace if the doorbell was ringing. I’d been doing that for a couple of years without incident yet somehow on this particular morning I managed to miss a step and fly forward into the ground.

I didn’t fly very well.

My very first thought was relief that I had somehow not bashed my head into the sharp corner of the office building; followed quickly by equal relief that I had somehow fallen sideways onto the grass rather than the rough concrete. And then I noticed my left hand and deja vu took over.

I stood up and cautiously worked my way through my fingers and from both the lack of voluntary movement and the grinding that accompanied using my other hand to move it, it was quickly clear all was not well with my ring finger. It was not painful yet, I wasn’t sure if it was really broken or merely dislocated, but it needed medical attention.

By the time I was seen it was sore. Taking my wedding ring off made it considerably more so. Much of my hand was starting to swell and would remain bruised for weeks but the damage was in that finger. What damage? Well we didn’t yet know. The local radiologist wouldn’t be back at work until Wednesday, so in the meantime it got splinted up and I had to wait.

The waiting somewhat suited me. While I had initially planned to spend my week off spinning, before the house sale had gone through I had made other plans to take my nephew to Christchurch on the Monday and Tuesday. We’d gotten cheap carry on flights that weren’t refundable and changing the dates would be awkward anyway for any number of reasons. My nephew is still on his learner’s licence, so I would be doing all the driving, which until Saturday morning hadn’t been a concern. Now it was more of a problem. But between the analgesics, my impression that it must just be dislocated like last time since there were no particular angular bits, and my own stubborn nature, we went anyway.

It was a good trip overall, I’m glad we went, but it certainly wasn’t the prudent thing to have done. On Wednesday I had the x-ray and the result was confirmation it was broken. But the image wasn’t quite clear enough to tell what was going on so I had to have another x-ray in a week’s time, after which I could go to the hand physio.

This, really, was probably the first mistake. If, as the Waikato specialists believed after the second x-ray, it was a simple break that would self-heal, the splint I was in was the worst type to ensure I regained full mobility. When I did finally see Liz, she seemed a bit bemused they hadn’t sent me to her pretty much immediately. Not for manipulation, but for the appropriate support. The medical centre had kept it safe on the day, but it wasn’t meant to stay like that for two weeks. Anyway, this is what she gave me on that day.

As I say, the Waikato Plastics team gave the go-ahead, it would self-heal, so Liz and I worked on that basis. Each week she adjusted the splint and gradually introduced gentle exercises to try to restire mobility, always very clear that exercises were only to stretch, never to the point of pain. I was still swollen and bruised, and she believed there was tissue damage. The only way to confirm that would be a specialist ultrasound, something I couldn’t get done in town, so we carried on.

At ten weeks, with little progress and swelling and bruising still present it looked like I was going to have to make the 3 hour trip to get the ultrasound done, but before that she decided to try the x-ray one last time just to confirm the bone really had healed as expected.

The result was unexpected: there had been no healing whatsoever, the 10 week image was pretty much identical to the 2 week one.

So Liz referred me to a plastic surgeon.

Now to be clear, by this point I hadn’t been wearing a splint at all for several weeks – we had been trying to work on mobility, after all. I couldn’t lift with that hand but I was using my other fingers and had been merrily packing and then unpacking boxes in the new house, touch typing without that finger, and doing everything pretty much normally. I had even started crocheting again. The finger was still swollen but was rarely sore unless I knocked it, and I’d gotten good at not doing that.

So when I got the call at lunchtime on Tuesday about a 4pm appointment with Simon the specialist in Thames, I didn’t think twice. I drove myself over there.

Simon explained that the problem was quite obvious to him from the first x-ray and he was angry it hadn’t been immediately picked up by his colleagues at Waikato. He said he would be talking to them about it, and I’m quite sure he did.

He explained that I must have landed with my body weight on the tip of the finger, and that the lower bone had gone up through the base of the middle bone, pushing some of it up and breaking bits off to side. It was never going to self-heal, at least not in a functional way, it needed piecing back together in surgery.

The good news was two-fold. Firstly, in spite of the delay it had not started to heal badly, so it wasn’t getting worse. Secondly, by pure chance one of the broken bits had wedged in such a way that I simply had not been able to bend it. This is good because if I had been doing Liz’s exercises I could easily have worn away all the cartilage, something he can’t fix, but as it happens it is all still intact. So at 10 weeks it was in as good a condition for surgery as at 1 week.

Hooray!

Of course, my cancer diagnosis has gotten in the way. The sad truth of it is that Simon doesn;t dare operate if there’s a chance I’ll start chemotherapy before my finger bone has healed. If that happens, he assures me that it will never heal. This is not a result we want.

In the meantime, he has asked that my hand be immobilised to avoid doing any new damage while we wait. Of course I had to drive home that afternoon, but the next morning Liz made me a new splint which I have been wearing ever since.

It it, as intended, quite restrictive. From the front it is near identical to the one Liz first made me, but it comes further across my palm with a solid piece wrapping between my thumb and index finger, and it reaches higher above the tips of my fingers. I technically have the use of my thumb and index finger, but in practice I’m quite limited. The splint gets in the way if I try to type, I can’t hold a knife and fork to cut anything, I’m more one-handed than I was three weeks after the original injury.

On the up side it never gets knocked now, the splint and the other two fingers do a good job of protecting it. The swelling has almost entirely gone down since I’m no longer irritating it with exercises it can’t do. In fact, most of the time it feels quite normal, I just can’t use it for anything practical.

I also don’t know what’s happening in terms of healing. At 10 weeks it was doing fine but that was mid-September and it’s now the last week of October. Is it still just waiting, or is it calcifying unhelpfully? I don’t know and can’t do anything about it regardless.

My best hope is that the result of Wednesday’s review will be surgery first. There would then necessarily be a healing period before any chemo could start and that just might give enough time to also get my hand done. If not, I see myself wearing this splint well into 2026.

That’s a depressing note to finish on, so let’s end instead with some good news. Last weekend, in frustration, I looked up on YouTube whether it was possible to knit or crochet one handed. The answer is yes. I found some inspiring examples of people who had suffered strokes or amputations and found ways around it. I was inspired, but in the meantime experimented and was joyful to discover that with large needles I can actually manage to knit with the splint and without putting pressure on my finger. Crochet was more difficult, my fingers instinctively want to curl, but I can lean a large knitting needle against my splint. So I’ve been happily crafting again, pretty much the first time since 19 July. Anyone need a set of hand spun, hand dyed, hand knitted hat and hand warmers? No, of course not as we come into summer, but I don’t care. I’m having fun 🙂