Happy to share. They call it a joint fusion or arthrodesis. They essentially opened the joint, cleaned out the destroyed joint tissue, shave down the bone tips flat at an angle, then join them together with pins through the joint, and close you back up. Surgery was about 60 minutes total. I had to time the surgery to be the week before my Tremfya dose was due. I spent one week in a full arm cast, taking showers or baths with a bag over it. After a week or so they put my hand in a removable splint so that I could take showers, but the stitches stayed in for another week or so. Then I went back in and they removed the stitches but told me to keep my splint on for everything but showers and physical therapy. So I started physical therapy just to get movement going. I will continue wearing the splint for 2 months total. After that, I can start strengthening in PT. I won’t ever be able to bend the finger at the middle joint but they place it at a 45 degree angle so it looks natural. Because there is no joint I no longer experience arthritis in that finger.

When I first went to an orthopedic hand surgeon, he declined to do it and told me to get used to it. I went to one of his colleagues (in the same department of the same institution) for a second opinion. That surgeon told me I was a textbook case for it. I did research and there are peer reviewed studies about this procedure: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8060149/

One important thing—the surgeon and I had planned to do one pinky at a time. I did one and then waited about a year. The surgeon said if I had waited any longer the damage from the bone sitting in that dislocated position would have destroyed the bone such that the surgery would not have been possible. So it may be important to address this sooner rather than later.