From thumb pain to a full return to fitness

When a painful thumb starts getting in the way

Keeping active is a big part of Sandy’s life. Alongside looking after her mother, Sandy, in her early 50s, stays fit by walking her dog, going to the gym and taking part in circuit training throughout the week.

While she kept herself fit and healthy, Sandy started noticing something wasn’t quite right with her left thumb. “It would ache when it was cold,” she recalls. “But then one day, I went to pick up some shopping out of the boot of my car, and I just couldn’t hold onto it.”

Her thumb soon started to become very painful, and it was stopping her from enjoying her active lifestyle. “I couldn’t lift dumbbells, I couldn’t do burpees, I couldn’t do anything that would involve my hands,” she says. Naturally, as someone who likes to keep active, this was frustrating for Sandy.

But Sandy’s thumb wasn’t only stopping her from enjoying the gym and circuit training; it was impacting her daily life. “I couldn’t even do simple things like opening a jar.” At this point, she decided it was time to look into the problem and get treatment.

A small joint with a big impact

Sandy had thumb base osteoarthritis, where the cartilage at the bottom of the thumb wears away. Cartilage covers the ends of the bones in the thumb joint, stopping them from rubbing together. When it wears away, the bone underneath thickens, causing small bony spurs to grow, resulting in pain and reduced movement.

After doing her research on the top orthopaedic experts in her area, Sandy found Mr David Murray, a Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon specialising in hand and wrist surgery at The Wilmslow Hospital.

Initially, Sandy had minor surgery to remove some small bones from her knuckle to see if that would help with her pain. “Mr Murray did say that eventually I’d need my thumb joint replacing,” Sandy says. “I gave it a few months, but it was just getting worse and worse. I couldn’t even lift things up anymore.”

A new approach to thumb surgery

Wanting a permanent solution to her pain, Sandy returned to Mr Murray. He presented her with two treatment options – a trapeziectomy or a thumb ball joint replacement. A trapeziectomy involves removing the trapezium, the small wrist bone at the base of the thumb. While this would help ease Sandy’s pain, a trapeziectomy has a long recovery time of up to a year,

While still a relatively new procedure, the ball joint replacement has a much shorter recovery time and has seen lots of success around the world. Wanting to get back to her active lifestyle as soon as she could, Sandy chose to have the thumb ball joint replacement.

“I went in for a few scans of my thumb and returned for the results. In my appointment, Mr Murray told me I could have the operation the following week, so I went for that!” says Sandy. The surgery was performed as a day-case procedure, with Sandy coming into The Wilmslow Hospital in the morning and heading home that same afternoon. “It went like clockwork.” says Sandy.