THE PYROTECHNIC FINGER

DAY 51-52

Never underestimate the power of a splinter and the consequences of not getting it out straight away. Managed to get one from picking up a piece of firewood in the first week of August last year. Being right handed, it wasn’t exactly easy to extract it from my right little finger using my left hand. Obviously wasn’t going to work, so a couple of days later asked a nurse friend if she’d have a go so out came the splinter probe. Prod, poke, pick, but no luck, couldn’t get the thing.

Persisted with my own attempts, still no success, so off to the Doc. Now, my Doc’s a good bloke, but when it comes to things like this he doesn’t do anything by halves. Sliced and diced the jolly thing, too bad about the pain, even he couldn’t find anything. It was there, I know it was there.

Meanwhile, even with no obvious infection which splinters have a habit of doing when you don’t get them out, the little finger started to look rather weird. What had started out as a small lump encasing the offending invader was now growing, and each day brought with it something new to observe. Two months into the saga it finally decided to get infected and had grown into something resembling Vesuvius about to erupt. Back and forth to the Doc, it got to the stage where he was calling me The Finger, so he sends me off for an ultrasound to see if the blighter that started all this is hiding somewhere we can get at it.

Must admit I felt a bit of a dill having an ultrasound on my little pinkie, but when that also turned up nothing he concluded that the increasing mass overtaking the top of my finger was probably a pyogenic granuloma, the skin’s adverse reaction to the initial injury. A what? Had to Google that one to check it out, made sure I could find a picture, and there it was, in fact there were several sorts, all little volcanoes on the verge of exploding.

So what next? Off to the surgeon, by now it’s the first week of December, and after four injections (oooooh that was the worst bit, you don’t exactly have any fat on your hand to cushion the pain of those), the volcano was cut out, leaving a crater the size of….sorry, my knowledge of moon craters is very limited, but it was big, and when it’s on your little finger there’s really nothing to pull together and stitch up. “So what’s going to stop this thing growing back again?” I ask. “Well, I cut it out,” says the surgeon, “no reason why it should.” Went home satisfied, driving with my bandaged pinkie pointing skyward.

And the outcome? IT’S STILL THERE! Thought it was healing nicely, but as the crater filled in it began to look suspiciously familiar, and now almost six months into the long drawn out saga I still have this lump on my finger which admittedly is not as bad as the original, but it looks back at me with a disconcerting alien face. Who knows what we’ll have to do next.