When 53-year-old Jean Williams Taylor posted a photo of her fingernail to Facebook in 2018, she could have never imagined it would lead to a battery of medical tests and a cancer diagnosis.
Taylor had worked in a factory for many years and remembers her mother’s nails having a curve to them as well – she just assumed she had overworked hands and was genetically predisposed to curved nails.
But after she moved from the factory to an office job and her nails started to grow longer, she thought they looked odd enough to post a photo online to ask for advice.
Friends and followers urged her to see a doctor about it, which she found “a tad extreme.” Nevertheless, she did consult a physician in the UK where she lives. And it’s a good thing she did.
It was her daughter, Stephanie Taylor, 31 at the time, who had done enough Internet research to finally convince her it was necessary to consult a doctor. While she said she felt “ridiculous” making an appointment about something as seemingly unimportant as an “ugly” fingernails, she now knows that a curved nail can be a sign of lung cancer.
Now, that doesn’t mean you should panic if you have any bend in your nails. But it is important to keep in mind that “nail clubbing” – which is when the tips of the fingernails curl around your fingertip as they grow – can be a sign of low oxygen in the blood. It’s also a sign that the body is suffering from anything from lung to cardiovascular disease.
When doctors saw Taylor’s nails they immediately ordered blood tests, a chest X-ray, a CT scan, and PET scan. The results led doctors to do a lung biopsy and that’s when the grandmother-of-3 got worried.
“I told the consultant that I didn’t want this lung biopsy. I was scared. It was too much, and it was happening too quickly. I knew there was too much going on for it to be asthma or something else,” she told the Manchester Evening News.
The bad news came in August of 2018 – Taylor knew that scheduling a biopsy meant she probably already had lung cancer and the doctors were just trying to gauge how far it had spread.
“…I knew at that point it was lung cancer. It was just if it had spread anywhere else, how bad, how big. I have to say that was the worst four days [waiting for my lung biopsy] I’ve had in my entire life.”
But the worst was yet to come.
“I went [to hear my diagnosis] with my son Aiden, Stephanie and my best friend Christine. The doctor sat us in a room and said ‘it’s not good news. You’ve got lung cancer.'”
The real blow was that it had spread to both lungs – and the cancer was the size of a golf ball in her left lung. That’s where she’ll have surgery first. Then in her right lung. After that, she faces radiotherapy.
But it could have been worse – she could have never asked about the abnormality of her fingernail and she might have found out far too late.
Now, she has a good chance of living many more years as well as helping others identify an important sign of illness.
While clubbed nails can mean many things, it’s always helpful to consult a doctor to be sure.
Taylor thinks that her post will not only help raise awareness among men and women with the abnormality but alert nail technicians as well so they can point it out to their clients.
“I know a girl who is currently training at college to do nails, and she messaged me to ask if she could share it in her technician group because she’d never heard of it,” Taylor said.
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