Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Happy New Thumb



Last week was a big week in our house - Sadie got her cast off. She did great and is loving her new thumb. She's not using it a lot yet, for a couple reasons. It's in a splint almost all the time (we take it off for baths, occupational therapy, and some "supervised play time of a few minutes"). It's also just going to take some time and therapy for her to learn to use it. But she can wiggle it a little, and she can now hold things between her thumb and first finger. Her finger does most of the work at this point, but it's a start. In another 2 weeks, we'll move to just using the splint at night, and I expect her to start using it a lot more at that point. But so far, so good. :-) She told her doctor "thank you for my new thumb"..isn't she the sweetest?? (she also told her doctor that his tech needed a raise, but she had some prompting on that one! She's totally charmed the whole office!!)




5 comments:

Sherri said...

Can you explain how they gave her the thumb?

She is so cute! And I can't wait to see her use that new thumb!

Grandma said...

Wow, Sadie! That's a beautiful new thumb!

Pandamonium Mom said...

Hey Sherri,
I need your e-mail address..mine is DeEtte530@juno.com
If you e-mail me, I'll put you in my address book. I think I had it at one time, but...well, I'm not so organized. :-)
I hope you get this reply - but anyway. Sadie's thumb..it was her index finger. They took her index finger, shortened it a little, rotated it, moved some tendons and stuff around and did some other "technical things" and turned it into a thumb. So she has the same number of fingers she always did..4. But now, instead of 4 fingers and no thumb, she has 3 fingers and a thumb. She was pretty amazing with 4 fingers, but the things she couldn't do were things like hold a medium size object like a phone or cup, pull her pants up and down, etc...so the hope is that having a thumb will help her do those things. (she doesn't have a thumb on her other hand either).

She's doing a little more with it everyday. So I fully expect when she gets the all-clear to not wear her splint all the time (in 2 weeks), she'll really start using it more.

DeEtte

The Ferrill's said...

Yay for a thumb! Amazing!!!!!!!
Kimmie is so funny...the other day she said to me "Mommy, I not have a thumb on this hand." (I was shocked...I didn't even know she knew what a thumb was!) I said "Nope, but you've got 4 beautiful fingers!"
I have some stories...we need to get together! These girls amaze me!

Tricia said...

Sadie, I love your new thumb! I hope you and Hannah are having a fun summer! I love you guys,
Tricia