My Hand Mystery Solved....

Here are some lovely pictures of my birth mark! Ugly birth mark......
Normal hand....
And ugly hand again, can't figure out how to delete a duplicate picture!

So..... last Tuesday I went to Stanford to meet with an interventional radiologist, Dr. David Hovsepian. I took with me records from Kaiser, MRI, and a contrast angiogram. He knew immediately what was wrong with my hand. Yeah for Stanford knowing all the weirdest stuff out there! It is what they call a Congenital Vascular Malformation (CVM), which happens in barley 1% of all births. So yes it is sort of a birth defect, or they like to say birth mark. I knew I was a freak of nature! Anyways he is very familiar with them, they tend to be in the extremities, and usually become an issue in the late teens. I can't remember when I first noticed it I just know it has been at least 11-12 years and it is progressivley getting worse. I have a really ugly " bump" on the back of my hand which everyone usually notices, but I also have the underside of my wrist that is always extremely swollen and then on my forearm there is another spot where I have a lot of pain, and the number one reason I was concerned was that my middle finger does not extend in the flexed position. He feels like he can start to treat it slowly. It will be a surgical procedure know as sclaratherapy (don't know the spelling exactly), and it unfortunately means they have to do more than one procedure most likely. They go in with a needle and with an active contrast x-ray and will burn a vein with alcohol, and hopefully rid me of some of them. The risks are that the alcohol burns my skin, hits a nerve and causes nerve damage or hits a vein he doesn't want with some leakage. He feels that we can start in the underside of my wrist to hopefully stop the problem with my middle finger not being able to extend fully in a flex position. He says he likes to be cautious and do a little at a time, Kaiser should approve it since they didn't even know what it was. The scary part for me is being put to sleep! Oh well, this is probably the most BORING blog entry ever, but now you know, I know, we all know that I am a FREAK!