Hey, folks. Someone asked above about other people with chondrosarcoma. I had a bone tumor in my little finger when I was 27 years old. The bone broke when something relatively light fell on it, and when it was x-rayed, they found the tumor. Because tumors in the hand are almost always benign, they diagnosed it as benign in spite of a rather ominous biopsy report (which I didn't discover until years later) and sent me on my way.

Nine years later, the same thing happened. I had a pathological fracture in the same bone while bracing my hands on a horse's neck as we went over a jump. Again, they scooped the tumor out and used bone chips from elsewhere in my body to fill the tumor in.

Three years after that-- yep, the same thing. This time they found it before I broke it because they were following me intermittently. I insisted they run imaging because that bone was hurting so much. The hand surgeon thought it was just pain from my hand being operated on repeatedly. Sure enough, the tumor was back and this time it had grown through the end of the bone into the joint space at the base of the finger. I had another surgery to remove it. I asked the hand surgeon directly if the tumor could be malignant, and he insisted it couldn't be. Then I fired him and referred myself to an oncologist with expertise in bone tumors. The oncologist was alarmed by this history and referred me to another hand surgeon, who monitored me from that point.

About a year later, imaging shows that the tumor was back. This time it was diagnosed as a chondrosarcoma, and the oncologist and hand surgeon concurred that I would need that finger and underlying bone in the palm of my hand amputated. Frankly, I was fine with that, given that the joint hurt almost all the time, even when I wasn't using my hand.

That last surgery was almost exactly 25 years ago. I'm happy to say I haven't had any more bone tumors since then. I hope this is encouraging to others who might have weird bone tumors in their hands.