back in 2016/2017 I noticed some weakness in my right index finger – it wouldn’t extend (straighten) as far as my other fingers. At the time I was about eight years recovered from some serious RSI in both wrists that had affected my range of motion, and I assumed this was the same or similar flaring up due to an increased freelance art workload/a kickstarter/et cetera, and simply stretched my way through it.
in 2019 i was doing physio for an upper back injury and asked about it, as the finger was still weak, and we started rebuilding some movement, loosening up the knuckle joint, etc. we didn’t get to do much tho because I broke my ankle catastrophically and had to redirect my energy to relearning how to walk.
in 2022 I was finally done acute ankle recovery and asked another physio about the weak finger extension, and she and I went through a few months of me trying to rebuild strength in it. At this point it was clear that the weakness also impacted my middle finger, but that was the only symptom – there was no pain or any sort of discomfort.
After a few months showed us that there was no progress being made, the physio recommended I ask my doctor for a peripheral neurology assessment, because it seemed like I had maybe some nerve injury or compression happening somewhere in my arm that would cause this.
September 2022 I saw the neurologist, who spent two hours with me doing all the tests, only to say “that’s weird. get an ultrasound.” By December 2022 I’d had an ultrasound, MRI and CT scan of my arm and we were quite sure there was a growth much farther up my arm.
February 2023 I was meeting with a peripheral nerve surgeon; he assured me there was no reason to think this was cancer, but, they were taking it seriously nonetheless.
In May they did surgery to see if they could remove the mass without damaging the nerve. Turned out the mass WAS the nerve, though, so it was back to square one while the surgeon explained nerve grafts and tendon transfers and so forth.
October 2023 I had the surgery to remove the growth and a few cm of nerve on either side of it, and to graft in a very long piece of nerve from my right calf.
It went well!
The nerve they took from my calf had no motor function, just sensory, and so doesn’t affect my movement, but it’s two hefty scars on that leg at the top and bottom of the chunk they removed.
The nerve they removed from my arm has been to every lab in Canada that might know something about weird nerve growths, now, and they have found nothing wrong with it, except that it had grown there in the first place, functionally destroying the use of that nerve slowly over eight years.
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