Tiny Fingernails
“I looked down and saw it: my first prosthetic arm”
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Colin and I were at my grandmother’s house last winter, decorating Christmas cookies with my mom, my grandmother, my aunt, and my five younger siblings, a tradition we’ve carried out since I was in grade school. Colin, a six foot three, thirty-year-old man, is completely engrossed in decorating cookies to look like zombies with my little brothers. I sat beside him chatting with my mom and aunt.
Mamie, as I call my grandmother, has boxes upon boxes of toys—the ones that belonged to my dad and my aunt, some that belonged to my cousin, and many that she had collected and stored for me over the years. There are all the wooden baby toys my parents had been so proud of, banning any and all plastic gifts from my early birthday parties. There are the Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls that Mamie sews for all the children in the family to this day, mine with only one full arm. Then there are the dozens of plastic toys that used to belong to my cousins but now sit in boxes in Mamie’s basement. On cookie day she brings the boxes out of the basement, even the plastic ones, since my mom doesn’t really care much about that anymore. I was standing with Mamie, sipping a glass of wine, when something hard and heavy hit me in the shin and then fell to the ground with a rubbery smack.
“Ow! What--” I looked down and saw it: my first prosthetic arm, really my only prosthetic arm, and my youngest brother Campbell, smiling up at me from the floor, drool dripping from his goofy, know-nothing toddler grin. I felt like laughing and throwing up at the same time. The sight of the grease-stained rubber and resin arm-shaped thing at my feet sent me, just for a moment, into a physical and emotional upheaval that I could feel in my earlobes and my groin. Colin’s hand went to my lower back.
I had gotten the prosthesis as a five-year-old. My dad’s mother, in particular, was worried that I wouldn’t live a normal life, that I’d be teased and harassed. So before I was old enough to notice the lack of my left arm my grandmother began to ask if I wanted to get a new arm, like a robot arm. I don’t know if I said yes or no, but a few weeks later, close to my fifth birthday, I was admitted to the Shriner’s hospital to be fitted for a prosthetic. Don’t get me wrong, I love her for it. She wanted the best life for me and she wanted me to explore every option.
Mamie took me for the casting, and the doctor wrapped the end of my left arm, below the elbow, in cold strips of gauze, wet with plaster of Paris. I was excited to get the cast and looked forward to wearing it to school, getting my friends to sign it in purple and lime green sharpie. Mamie explained that it wasn’t that kind of cast but I insisted and she asked the doctor if I could keep it. When I wore the thing to school I told people I had broken my elbow, not because I was ashamed of the cast’s true origins, but because it was more exciting and garnered more attention.
A few weeks later I got my new arm. The myoelectric prosthetics, the ones they have now that can sense the electrical activity and respond without physical effort were barely out of prototype and prohibitively expensive. Shriner’s paid for the mechanical one, but I only wore it for a very brief time.
The arm was heavy and uncomfortable, made of some kind of fiberglass. The technology is improving, rapidly now that so many veterans are returning from the wars in the Middle East absent their arms or legs or both. Back then it was unmotivated progress, not exactly at the forefront of medical research. Under the prosthetic I had to wear a little nylon glove over the end of my arm which was caked with baby powder to deter blisters that formed daily. After the powdering and the nylon barrier I would slip the end of my arm into the socket modeled after my cast at a specific angle. And there you had it—if you let your eyes relax into a blur a one-handed child became a two-handed one. Only not at all. The prosthetic arm was gloved in a silicon cover that was supposed to mimic the appearance of a natural hand. It was detailed, it even had rubbery fingernails, but combined with the limitation of movement the device was capable of, the fake hand cover wasn’t fooling anyone. The goal of the entire project was cosmetic, not utilitarian. Connected to the prosthetic was a kind of one-shouldered harness strap. When I wanted to open and close the tiny hand I had to pull my right shoulder forward to activate the pulley and, with some effort, the tiny fingers, all clustered together, would open and shut in the gesture you would use to indicate someone talking.
I gave it a few months. I went to Shriner’s retreats for kids missing limbs. I met other kids born without hands or feet, sometimes both. I met amputees and I learned the difference between them and me, about the different kinds of traumas we’d experienced. I learned how to fish, holding the rod in the grip of the prosthetic and reeling with my right hand. But with the prosthetic I found myself more limited than before. I had learned to tie my shoes at age three, and now, at age five, I couldn’t. Without the arm I could do monkey bars, at least three or four of them, by swinging my entire body to get momentum, and thrusting myself forward at just the right moment, like jumping out of a swing at the top of the arc to achieve that zero gravity propulsion, and reaching in mid-air to grab the next bar. I got a lot of calluses and also a lot of playground street cred, but I couldn’t do it with this plastic anchor swinging awkwardly from my left side. It didn’t work for me and was soon relegated to the closet of abandoned toys for my baby brother to discover, and weaponize.
And now, after two decades, seeing the this disturbingly lifelike synthetic replica of a human hand in miniature, designed to match my own, filled me with equal parts disgust and morbid hilarity. The thing was tiny, and I remembered being tiny inside it. My muscles and cells recalled the familiar heaviness. Something made to create a sense of balance, but really only accomplished a crude appearance of symmetry.
For twenty-one years I’d cultivated a sense of self that, perhaps immaturely, absolutely precluded fake body parts. It was my ethos. I’d lived, by then, for two decades as a woman with one hand, one full arm, one of something that should have been two. And in some ways I’d embraced it. In others, I’d hid behind it, or just plain hid it. After a moment, when I was able to exhale and break my slack-jawed staring contest with the flesh-colored appendage, I looked up at the thrower, my two-year-old brother, Campbell, blond and green-eyed with a bowl cut and a smile that would make your uterus glow.
“Big Sister,” he lisped, “I want to wear your arm.”
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