Consultation

A couple of days ago I noticed some strange pigmentation on my finger. There's a thin brown line in the middle of where my fingernail would be and what looks like a brown streak on the little fingernail which is growing. This worried me, since I hadn't noticed them before, and yesterday I called the hospital and they said the best thing to do would be to come to their next consultation without appointment session and have somebody look at it.

The next session was this afternoon from 2pm, and they recommended that I get there half an hour early so I wouldn't have to wait too long. I followed their advice, and ended up being the 14th person in the queue and had to wait an hour and a half into the session before I saw a doctor.

I actually ended up with five doctors in the consultation room at the end of my visit. It started with what I think was a couple of interns, one of whom I recognised from one of my operations during which there were always interns observing. Anyway, she looked at my finger, and while she said she couldn't say anything about the colouring of the nail, she said the line was definitely malignant or something.

Then they both went out of the room to look for my original doctor. They came back what felt like ages later with my pathology results and another more senior doctor. He said that they were a little confused because the pathology results and what was written in my history didn't completely coincide. He also looked at my finger and also said that the line was from my original lesion. He said that this was common, for remaining cells to colonise the recovering tissue. He also said that they were never too sure about what it was because they couldn't find any abnormal cells in the samples from my second or third operations and so assumed they had removed them all.

According to him, this was a somewhat fortunate thing, since they could clearly identify the abnormal cells in the center and since I was having an operation next week anyway, they would remove them as well as the rest of the nail bed as be absolutely sure of what it was. Since supposedly lots of people with my skin colouring get these sort of pigmentation on their nails and most of them are benign. And then my usual doctor came, with another one who had also been following my case, and they had a discussion of my history.

I think they were talking about my skin graft and healing progress, since they asked me how large the graft was and explained that there were a couple of types, and when I showed them how large it was, but said the top layer had fallen off, when my finger looked like now to him made sense.

If you aren't following this, it's because I was lost in all the French between the doctors and then somewhat confused by their English explanations. All I really need to know is that I have an operation next Friday before which I'm not allowed to take aspirin and that I may or may not have another skin graft, depending on how the doctor decides to operate. More pain, here I come...