This morning I went to the Hand Program at Toronto Western Hospital. Finally managed to have a peek at my chart so I could see exactly what the radiologist noted about the x-ray:

Indication: injury
Lucent line at the dorsal base of the distal phalanx with the bony fragment displaced by a distance of 2—3 mm.

Interpretation
Minimally displaced intraarticular avulsion fracture at the dorsal and ulnar base of the left fourth distal phalanx.

Definitions
Lucent line: Decreased opacity—classic sign of fracture
Dorsal: back
Distal: The far end of whatever you’re looking at
Phalanx (pl. phalanges) finger or toe bones
Intraarticular: crossing the surface of a joint
Avulsion fracture: fragment of bone tears away from the main mass of bone
Ulnar: on the side of the ulna bone (one of the two forearm bones)

Evidently this rather alarming-sounding (to me) medicalese was not serious enough for the doctor to be too concerned. He briefly looked at the radiologist’s note, barely looked at the x-ray (and didn’t even bother to look at the side-view picture featured in my previous post), slapped a splint on my fingertip and said see you in two weeks. So it doesn’t look like it’s much to be concerned about.

Although if it ends up being something to be concerned about I’m going to be seriously ticked off at him.

My teeny-tiny, oh-so-high-tech finger splint.

On the evening of April 1st I was spotting while Jon was doing his physio. He was cruising along the kitchen counter when he made a grab for the video remote, lost his balance and toppled over…

(The title of this post, by the way, doesn’t have anything to do with Jon this time. Whew, you say. Back to the story…)

I made an instinctive grab for Jon as he fell, but missed. My left ring fingertip caught on his shirt as he went plop (very nicely on his bum, I might add. He’s always been surprisingly good at breaking his falls.) It was only a couple of minutes later that I noticed that my finger hurt. Over the evening it swelled up, went splotchy purple along one side, and still hurt. I guessed that it was a sprain and decided to splint it and wait to see how it felt, rather than cool my heels in emerg all night.

A day later the last joint of the finger looked puffy and purple, so with horrific visions of mallet finger dancing in my head I decided to go to the walk-in clinic and get it checked out.

“Just a bad sprain,” the doctor said soothingly. “Rest, ice, elevation; splint only if you want to. I’ll give you a requisition for x-rays if it starts feeling worse.”

Fast-forward two weeks and about 100 Advil later. I’m not sure the finger’s feeling worse, but it’s definitely not getting any better, so I get x-rays taken and go to my regular doctor.

“I can’t be sure until I get the x-rays,” she says, “but it’s most likely a sprain.”

X-rays come in the next day. Guess what! (Well, you’ve read the title, so you should know already.) Now I’ve exhausted the resources of family practice and have to haul my sorry finger to the orthopedic doctors at a hand clinic. However, apparently it’s extremely hard for a patient from a family doctor to get appointments at a hand clinic within a month (and by then your broken finger might be an orthopedic wreck). She was getting ready to call me to tell me to go to a hospital emergency room—that way I’d probably only have to wait a week to get to a clinic. Luckily the nurse doggedly called every hospital hand clinic she could think of until she lucked into an appointment for tomorrow morning (thank goodness for cancellations!)

So tomorrow I find out what I get done to this poor finger. The alternatives seem to be A) splint; and B) surgery. Neither sounds fun, but one sounds a lot less fun than the other.