Hands are an idle playground: Teen gets life-altering hand job

Health News

And by hand job I mean plastic surgery – like a nose job – in case you had something else in mind. On the other hand, there is no telling what a 17 year old boy of Guinea West Africa can do now that he has a functional left arm. Mamadou – formerly known as Devil Hands – “was born with my elbows bent inwards and my wrists bent downwards. I couldn’t straighten my arms, but I learned how to cope,” he told the Daily Mirror. The rare condition that kept the youth from lowering his arms below his head has no known cause, but you can believe that he didn’t put his hands in the air because he just didn’t care.

In fact he did care a lot. “I told the nurse (from U.K.-based Christian organization Mercy Ships) I could do so much more than people thought,” he told the Mirror. Hopefully he and nurse spoke the same lingua franca, since you’d think sign language probably wasn’t his forté. Mercy Ships sends vessels like the Africa Mercy – which they refer to as a “floating hospital” – from port city to port city offering free medical care to those in need. Without telling his parents – who had sent him 300 miles away from home to capital Conakry to beg in the streets (though god only knows how they expected him to extend his arm in order to receive a hand-out) – the then 15 year old Mamadou approached the seafaring doctors with his story.

The volunteer plastic surgeon for Mercy Ships Dr. Tertius Venter repaired the boy’s left arm by moving one finger from his right hand to the left in order to create a thumb. Since he only had four fingers per hand, his right hand now has only three digits, and his right arm is still curved inward – though the doctor managed to lower it. Still, Mamadou is grateful. “If they had tried to fix my right arm, it would have only have made things worse for me,” he said. “I was just happy they could do anything at all. I don’t scare people away anymore” He does not beg anymore either and works at a market stall in Conakry with his uncle, and hopes to own his very own stall and support a family of his own in the future. As for Mercy Ships, he considers them “guardian angels.” That may be so but, where were they when Edward Scissorhands needed them?

Related Read:

Be my Eyes app: the king leading the blind.

17-year-old boy with “Devil Hands” undergoes life-changing plastic surgery.

The post Hands are an idle playground: Teen gets life-altering hand job appeared first on Health-News.com.