The doctors told me my frozen finger was broken… but it was actually a rare, aggressive tumor

We all suffer from stiff joints sometimes and this is often because we are older and/or have slept in a strange position.

This is what Natalie Garcia, 29, from New York, thought when she woke up one morning and noticed her middle finger was ‘frozen’.

Doctors repeated this and told her that the problem was probably a fracture or a small broken bone.

But two months later, Ms. Garcia sat in her doctor’s office and was given nightmare news: her “broken” finger was in fact a fast-growing tumor.

The diagnosis marked the beginning of a grueling journey that saw her endure seven months of powerful chemotherapy and ultimately undergo surgery to remove her finger.

‘When she said the word tumor, my jaw dropped. I thought I had a fracture,” Ms. Garcia said.

“I didn’t know you could have a tumor in your finger.”

The ordeal began on January 1 last year, when Ms Garcia woke up and found she could not move her finger. It didn’t hurt but was slightly bent, but she couldn’t straighten it completely.

Two or three days later the digit became swollen, so she went to the emergency room where the doctors gave her ibuprofen.

Doctors took an X-ray to find out why her finger still wasn’t moving, but couldn’t find anything and told Ms. Garcia she was fine.

She returned home, but was called back hours later after doctors re-examined the X-ray and informed her of a small fracture on her finger that they had initially missed, and advised her to consult an orthopedic surgeon.

But when she returned to the hospital and had an X-ray, she said the entire medical team “freaked out.”

“It looked like someone had taken an eraser and erased part of my bone,” she said.

She was referred to a hand specialist for an MRI scan, who told her she wasn’t sure what it was, but thought it was a benign tumor.

In April, a hand tumor specialist recommended that she undergo an open biopsy, in which doctors cut open her finger to remove a small piece of the tumor for testing.

The results confirmed it was a benign tumor, but it was an aggressive type of giant cell tumor, so doctors removed it during surgery in May.

Ms Garcia had a tenosynovial giant cell tumor (TGCT) – a rare type of tumor that grows in the joints and is usually not cancerous. Ms. Garcia’s grew on both her finger bone and her joint.

In very rare cases, TGCTs can turn into cancerous tumors.

Approximately 43 in every million people in the world are diagnosed with TGCT each year.

Doctors still don’t know what caused the tumor to develop in the first place.

The following month, her finger began to swell and grow a lump.

The doctor said, ‘Oh my God, the tumor is back. This is very aggressive, we just removed it.”

She had surgery again to remove the second tumor. “It was a failure,” she said.

‘I was very disappointed after the operation.’

The doctor told her she also had to take a chemotherapy pill or have her finger amputated.

In September 2023, the surgeon was unable to completely remove the tumor.

Feeling like she had no other choice, she started the chemotherapy pill, and stayed on it until April 2024.

Initially, her tumor started to shrink. There were a few times when she couldn’t take the medication because the labor hadn’t arrived, saying the tumor was growing “so fast.”

The medication then stopped working and the tumor started to enlarge again, causing her finger to become crooked.

Doctors told her they couldn’t save her finger and that she would have to have it amputated because the tumor would always grow back.

She has undergone a beam amputation, in which doctors move the remaining fingers closer together to make it less obvious that one is missing.

“I think it was the best decision, even though it was a very difficult decision and I still mourn my finger,” she said.