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 🙂

Little update as I go to lunch, the consultants team aren’t meeting today so my case gets reviewed next Wednesday rather than today.

Nothing to be done about it, I just have to keep waiting.

In a way, it all starts with me wanting to donate blood.

I did my gap year in England in 1996 at the height of the ‘mad cow disease’ outbreak so there was a chance of me developing Creuzfeld-Jakob disease sometime in the following 40 years. There was no test for it, you just had to wait to see what happened, but in the meantime I’ve never been able to donate blood. Fair enough, I don’;’t want to be giving someone else that 40 year countdown to wait through.

But last year, through the miracles of medical developments, I was finally free to donate (a full 12 years early!) and I cheerfully did so in mid-winter. (July, for my northern hemisphere readers ^_^). It’s a mobile sevice that comes out our way about four times a year. They’re always after more donors so they were back on the phone about another opportunity in November, but I was going to have just travelled overseas, so we settled on a January appointment.

Come January I happily turned up, filled in the paperwork and presented a finger for the obligatory blood iron test… which I failed. This caught me by surprise. I went through two pregnancies with no iron issues, so they tested again. And again. Nope, definite fail. So I didn’t get to donate, but they did take a vial to have it lab tested for me.

When the results came in I apparently was fine. The letter explained various things about how the onsite testing can be oversensitive, etc, but essentially there was nothing to worry about.

In the meantime, I had hurt my back, triggering a sciatic nerve issue from a few years earlier. I went to the dr and showed them the letter about my iron levels but the focus was on organising physio for my back.

Some months later I’d finished physio. I was still getting aches at times and tended to put it down to other things, sleeping on bad angles, lifting things (we had the house half-packed for open homes), menstrual cycle and so on. The latter was being annoyingly heavy, but not odd.

In July I booked a week off as a nice calm break. I was going to spin and dye some yarn, and work on my cross stitch. Instead we had an offer on the house and went unconditional and so needed to seriously start packing everything else. So that first Saturday morning I began by packing my external office ready for it’s move. Or, I would have if I hadn’t fallen over and broken a finger at 9am.

Perhaps I’ll leave the adventures with my finger to a separate post, but the other thing I had planned for this week off was another dr visit just to check if my heavy periods were a concern or just perimenopausal symptoms. It seemed to be the latter. He did get me to do a blood test, though, and my iron was low so he prescribed some iron tablets.

That was July. August’s period made it clear my body disagreed with the diagnosis. But we were moving. Move day was 4 September and I was taking 2 weeks off for the move so I scheduled another dr visit then. He suggested several possible options, still thinking it was likely just perimenopause at this point, but also sent me for an ultrasound just to be sure.

I had that on a Friday morning. By Friday afternoon I was rung and told I was being referred to a gynaecologist and an MRI might be needed to clear up the image.

Mum had had a hysterectomy at around my age (just a little younger) so at this point I thought that’s where we were headed.

And here’s where my broken finger comes back into the cancer story. After 10 weeks it was still swollen, sore, and unbending. We had bee told that the break would heal naturally so my physio believed it was a soft tissue injury, but just in case she sent me for another X-ray. I walked across the road to make an appointment and the radiologist had a gap in her schedule so did it straight away. While she was at it, my phone was ringing, and after the X-ray I rang back the missed call and it was the gynaecologist’s office making an apointment for the 26th, just under two weeks away. I was pleased to have gotten such a quick response, accepted, and went back to work.

Tuesday morning my physio rang with the X-ray results: no sign of healing at all. It was in exactly the same condition as it had been after 2 weeks. So she was referring me to a plastic surgeon. Then a few hours later I was called by the plastic surgeon’s assistant asking if I could be at an appointment in Thames that day at 4pm. Well it was rather short notice, it takes me about 1.5 hours to drive to Thames but sure, I could make that happen.

So off I went to Thames, and was soon meeting the lovely Simon who was very put out that my finger had been misdiagnosed and very keen to get in there surgically and fix it. He then casually asked if I had anything else going on medically so I told him about the ultrasound and my gynaecologist appoinment with Tarek. He knew Tarek and then declared he would speed things up by organising the MRI, which he did with remarkable speed and on Thursday I was having that.

Friday – one week since the ultrasound and still a week before I even met Tarek – Simon rang to say the MRI results were in and they now wanted a CT so he was organising that too. That ended up happening the following Tuesday.

By this time I was beginning to have some strong suspicions that we weren’t dealing with a straightforward hysterectomy, which Tarek confirmed that Friday. After first telling us Simon had checked in that morning on progress, he explained that the imaging all pointed towards cancer, but it can’t be officially labelled that without a tissue sample to confirm it. He was referring me on to the national consulting team who would now tell us what to do next, but it was likely to need a biopsy.

The biopsy turned out to be tricky. The growth started in the muscle of my uterus but went out, not in, so it’s hard to get to. He referred me for a CT guided biopsy and I finally struck my first set of thoroughly unhelpful people in this saga to date. I won’t name the practice but for the first week they said they were working on getting me an appointment. After 2 weeks they admitted the radiologist was on leave. Nearly a week later they rang Tarek’s office to say they’d made an appointment for me, but two days later they still hadn’t rung me and I was only getting an answerphone when I tried to ring them. It was highly frustrating.

In the meantime, Tarek decided that trying going from the inside was better than nothing so he did a biopsy that way and on Friday just gone we got the official result: cancer cells detected.

It’s not exactly something to celebrate but now it’s confirmed we can get on with figuring out what’s next. It also means I no longer need that troublesome CT guided biopsy appointment.

Tomorrow, Wednesday 22 October, is when the consultants team will be discussing my case and deciding what comes next, treatment or surgery. The coming long weekend is poorly timed for this, but I assume it will mean travel again next week. So far everything’s been in Hamilton (approx 6 hours in the car as a round trip) but these next ones are apparently likely to be Auckland-based, and almost certainly central Auckland so the same distance away.

For someone who gets carsick on a good day, living out here isn’t the best idea sometimes…

Oh well. That’s the story to date, so you’re all now all caught up.

Way back circa 2005 I set up my first ever blog as a web 2.0 exercise my team were working through. At the time I chose the somewhat unimaginative name KiwiCat. Later on, I kept a different blog while I lived in Wellington, to keep my Auckland-based friends and family up with what I was doing. I continued it for awhile after moving to Whitianga, mostly for the benefit of my elderly grandmother who couldn’t easily come to see us. After she passed, it lapsed and I’ve been blog-free… until now.

The fact is I have a diverse and geographically dispersed group of friends and family out there who are interested in what’s going on since my cancer diagnosis. And while I love chatting with all of you individually, keeping you all up to date with the latest news is going to be difficult. I thought about using Facebook… except I hate it and not everyone is on it… so I’ve settled for returning to the good old blog. I could have revived my last one, but LiveJournal isn’t the friendly place it used to be so here I am on WordPress starting fresh.

The choice to use a blog is somewhat ironic, since with my broken finger typing is currently tiresome, so expect some short posts at times. Or ones filled with mistakes when I’ve used the computer’s dictate function in a hurry and haven’t corrected the inevitable errors.

I don’t know how often I’ll be posting. The way this has gone so far has involved a lot happening in short bursts, with long periods of waiting between. But I’ll keep it up to date and give my husband editing rights so he can update if I can’t. He already has a WordPress account for his model railway club, so that should be easy to organise.

I also don’t know how many of you there will be bothering to read this. It’s probably not going to make for thrilling reading. Still, we’ll give it a go. Go ahead and pass on the link to anyone you think will be interested. I may at some point need to change some of the settings if trolls or AI-bots get into the comments, but for now I’ll just see how it goes.