Dupuytren’s
when his left pinky started to curl. He did not want his hand to be sliced open, and he was a trucker, so he didn’t need his pinky to earn a living. Dad just lived with a curled finger, and he still does. Then, I got it, years ago. For the longest time, the finger was just crooked and didn’t affect me. Then, a couple of years ago, it decided to tighten up altogether, and I decided something needed to be done about it.
The orthopedist I saw, who specializes in hand ailments, recommended the injection of a drug called Xiaflex. Xiaflex softens a specific form of collagen that’s formed in this disease, allowing the fingers to be physically straightened.
The orthopedist cheerfully described the procedure. He injects the drug into my hand, he said, and it does its work for two days. Then I would go back to him in two days, and he would pull my finger straight with a “pop.” That all sounded intriguing to me, and I imagined it to be the same sensation of cracking a knuckle. Wrong.
Injecting the Xiaflex was no fun. The hard flesh at the base of my curled pinky felt as if it were being set afire when the doc injected the drug in various lumps that were there. As he was doing so, he told me that it was not an easy injection; the needles tend to bend. I could not comment, as fireworks were going off in my head.
I had presumed, and I don’t know why, that Xiaflex would do its work without any pain. Wrong again.
My doc warned me that my hand would look terrible, “like you got bit by a snake,” he said. “And it’ll bruise in colors you’ve never seen before.”
Yep, and I also felt these zapping, electrical kind of spasms go through my hand and up into my arm for the next 24 or so hours. My elbow got sore, as did my upper chest near my armpit. When I went on the Xiaflex website, I discovered that this can be one of the drug’s side effects, it can cause soreness in lymph nodes.
Yikes!
I was, however, comforted by the fact that I did not have Peyronie’s disease, which affects a key part of the male anatomy and is another disorder Xiaflex is used to fix. One of the side effects in that treatment is called “a corporeal rupture or penile fracture,” according the Xiaflex website.
As I felt genuine gratitude that this pinky thing was the most serious health problem I had, and that I was able to get good care for it, I also came to the realization that not only was my disease impressive, it was super interesting, too.
My physician’s assistant sister-inlaw sent a link to an utterly fascinating article she found on the National Institutes of Health. It’s called “The Vikings and Baron Dupuytren’s disease,” written by Dr. Adrian E. Flatt.
Flatt tracked the disease back to 865 when the Vikings, “a great heathen army,” did their ransacking and pillaging and worse. Why did the disease affect them? No one knows. I mean, they weren’t the only ones to row boats and wield battle axes. But it did, and where wherever they settled, the contracture followed.
In Scotland, for example, there are records of the disease affecting bagpipers in the 15th century. The Scots called the disease “the curse of the MacCrimmons.”
Flatt also explains that the disease is named after Dr. Guillaume Dupuytren. Dupuytren was a star of his day, described by the medical journal The Lancet as “the most erudite and accomplished surgeon in Europe.” Dupuytren, who was born in 1777, was ambitious, extraordinary and unliked. Oliver Wendell Holmes said Dupuytren was “indifferent to those around him, sometimes, it is said, very rough with them.”
Flatt doesn’t fully explain why Dupuytren’s name got attached to the disease, but it also was affixed to at least 11 others, plus fractures, operations and instruments.
I’m typing this about a week after the procedure. The pinky and the area below it is a little sore and swollen yet. There’s a wound where the skin and flesh was torn when the finger was straightened.
Was it worth it to go through all this to be able to use one little finger? Yep. I’m looking forward to trying to play the guitar again, maybe the piano, too. To get a set of keys from my pocket. To grasp a cup. And typing As is thrilling. AAA!