My medical history II: the fingers.
As a pianist, the finger pain really got my attention. It started in my left index finger, at the knuckle where the finger attaches to the hand. I had broken this knuckle as a boy, when I punched my brother in his knee (he was sitting cross-legged, and my hand shattered). I lied to my parents about it (not cool to get hurt while punching one’s brother), and it went a long time before a doctor saw it. It was x-rayed eventually and was found to have been broken and healed, I think.
The finger pain was sharp, pulsated, and was accompanied by swelling. The joint looked bad.
Over the course of several years, the left thumb, the right thumb and the right index finger got involved. The worst was the left thumb joint where the finger attaches to the hand. It immediately swelled to twice its size, and hasn’t come back since.
After about 10 years of pain in my left index finger, I grew a nodule on the knuckle. That was proof to my doctors that something needed to be taken seriously. It had to do with the joint tissue swelling up and out of the joint.
It pissed me off that I had to have an externally visible, abnormal looking,kind of gross thing on my finger before I could get doctors to take my fingers, and the pain that they were in, seriously.
