Touching hands, and hearts

Last Tuesday I was at my GP practice. I was there to see someone who was described in the text they sent me, as a ‘First Contact’. It was a new role on me. Now Jane is an expert internet navigator. She is my go-to Google interrogator. If there is information in the virtual-sphere, she can find it. Using this undoubted skill, Jane was able to discover that the ‘First Contact’ I was going to see was a nurse. She was also a nurse with an extensive background and experience in orthopaedic care.  This was fortunate, as I was going to see her about my painful hands.

My appointment was made using PATCHS. It seemed incredible that I would be matched with a practitioner, who was best placed to help me, rather than a more generic health care practitioner. Yet it seemed I was. As I noted in a previous blog, my GP practice is quite extraordinary. I know that digital technology and AI developments are beginning to make all kinds of new ways of working possible, but of course, it could just have been serendipitous.

What wasn’t serendipitous was the care and compassion I experienced during my consultation. More of which later. First, I need to just briefly back track some 45 years, when I was foolish enough to do my own tree surgery. On one occasion, the ladder I was standing on, while working in a tree, slipped. I was thrown off the ladder, landing on the ground, and hurting my hands in the process. Over the years that followed, I started to suffer with painful hands, particularly at night. To this day, I don’t know if it was that fall from the ladder, or the many years of milking goats by hand that was the cause of my painful hands.

About 10 years ago, I underwent some investigations on my hands. One hand showed a small bony growth, that was probably causing some of the pain. However, both hands were showing signs of arthritis, and in both cases the arthritis was more acute and centred around the base of each thumb. Sometimes the pain was so bad that I felt I could no longer trust myself to grip or hold things safely. In most aspects of my life, this was simply an irritation. I found many ways to compensate. However, I loved climbing.

As a younger me, I was a sports climber. It was the only sport I was good at. Whilst feet and legs are important in climbing – that’s where the power to move comes from, not the arms - being able to use one’s hands for balance and grip is equally important. I have a healthy fear of heights, and becoming less confident about being able to use my hands without pain, I eventually, and very reluctantly, gave up climbing. More recently, the pain at night was waking me up every few hours. I don’t sleep for long periods anyway, and the increasing number of disruptive nights was taking their toll on my wellbeing.

Having put off going to see the doctor for many a year, Jane persuaded me that I needed to make an appointment and go and seek some help. Of course, when I say persuaded, what I actually mean is that she used my phone to fill in the PATCHS referral request and secured an appointment for a couple of days later with the ‘First Contact’. The consultation started with the usual history taking. Then there was a physical examination.

My hands were held in hers with such tenderness that the act felt almost therapeutic. There was no mistaking the crunching of bones against bone, or the pain, which was fairly intense. I have never subscribed to the notion of ‘therapeutic touch’ as an intervention, but I do know that touch and touching, and the use of hands to do so, can be a powerful diagnostic tool.  Indeed, there is much evidence to support the notion that touch can benefit both physical and mental wellbeing. Touch can have a positive effect whether it is in the health care context or in everyday experiences - a hug from a friend or a colleague for example. Indeed, our local church offers a monthly ‘healing hands’ service.

My visit to the GP surgery didn’t result in a cure. I was offered painkillers, steroid injections and even surgery to shave the bones in my hand. None of these appealed. It was Jane who found a solution, albeit it might be a temporary one. She interrogated the internet once more and found wrist brace's, developed by clinicians at Addenbrookes. She bought one, and it’s a game changer. I have now enjoyed a number of pain free nights. My heart, as well as my hands, felt touched by the gift.