Look Ma, No Hands

Why don’t I wear prosthetic arms?  In a nutshell, they are big, & heavy and even though they were hard to operate, it would’ve made sense to make them work if they did anything more than open & close. So basically, all I could do was “pick things up & put things down”.  So I opted to go without. I can do more without the prosthetics than I can with.  So how do I type? 

I invented this:

My stylus is my finger.  It’s magic because when I wear it I can type, dial the phone, turn pages in a book & pretty much anything a regular finger can do.  I’d be lost without it.

Then for things like the refrigerator or drawers, we attached a cloth ring so I can slide my arm through to get things open.  That works, also to open the car door.

As for eating, I have a plastic brace that I attach by Velcro, that I can attach a fork or spoon to.  This was something my prosthetist,  Tony, also made for me.  There’s a company that makes other attachments for my “arm” besides forks and spoons. They make things like gardening tools, fishing poles and chefs knives just to give you a random example. Initially I had two of these arms, one for each side but I didn’t use my left one because it was really difficult to cut my own food. So instead someone else cuts my food and we adapted the left brace to accommodate being on my right arm and we keep the other one as a spare in the car. I can’t tell you how frustrating  it is when I’m out with the family and everybody is hungry and I have no way to eat. Even after all this time, I still get embarrassed when Mike feeds me in public. It’s the worst. He never minds, but I do.