Pic shows: The 3-year-old girl with 14 fingers before surgery. CHINA: A girl born with 14 fingers - including two extra thumbs on each hand - has had life-changing surgery to correct the freakish birth defect going back five generations.
A three-year-old Chinese girl was born with 4 extra fingers, she had 14 hand fingers in total, and recently, she underwent life-changing surgery to remove the extra ones.
Unfortunately, the name of the girl was not shared with news agencies, but according to the doctor who did the surgery, the kid was born with a number of extra thumb-like fingers on her hands.
Reports suggest that the three-year-old is part of the 5th generation of her family who was born with extra fingers.
Even after knowing that the family has a genetic disorder, the family members of the girl who had the same problem were too poor to go through a surgery.
The minor got the life-changing surgery in the Central Hospital of Shenyang Medical College, which is located in the Liaoning province in the northeastern part of China.
After the surgery, the doctors in the Central Hospital of Shenyang Medical College said that they expecting the minor to have normal development and are also expecting that the surgery will have no effect on the appearance and function of her hands or fingers.
Dr. Zhan Jie, the doctor who did the life-changing surgery on the minor, said, “The girl had two extra fingers on each hand – quite a rare patient.”
He added, “The surgery was complicated by the fact that the fingers we wanted to keep and those we wanted to remove weren’t clear and obvious.”
Dr. Jie also said that they had to insert metal rods in her hands so they could redirect the growth of the bone in her thumbs and so her fingers could be straightened.
Dr. Zhan Jie continued, “Besides removing the extra digits, we also needed to make corrections to the angle. It’s been a month since the operation. She came back after two weeks to have her sutures removed. Both we and the patient’s family are satisfied with the appearance of her hands.”
Dr. Zhan said that no further surgery would be needed as everything has been looking so great so far.
The doctors in the Central Hospital of Shenyang Medical College did not only remove the extra fingers in the minor’s hands, but they also managed to remove the potential stigma that was related to her condition, which is called polydactylism.
Having extra fingers in your hands is known as polydactylism, it affects 1 in every 500 babies around the world.