Hector Salas was born with only a thumb and “nubbins” on one hand.
For his sixth Christmas, his father decided to give him the use of his left hand.
Father and son left their home in Peru and came to Baltimore seeking help, in the form of an operation that transplants toes for use as fingers, from the surgeons at Union Memorial Hospital?s Curtis National Hand Center.
The congenital condition called symbrachydactyly is rare, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the United States, according to the National Institutes of Health. This birth defect, which is not an inherited trait, occurs roughly in one out of 12,000 live births, according to the AMA, and played an understated role in the popular animated children?s feature “Finding Nemo.”
Curtis Center surgeons perform the toe-to-hand transfer surgery on children for multiple reasons, Dr. James Higgins said. Many operations result from traumatic injury, such as lawnmower accidents.
They perform the operation as often as 10 times a year, he said, with a 1 or 2 percent failure rate ? meaning the toe does not survive as a new finger.
“It?s a very uncommon problem,” Higgins said. “We see it, not uncommonly, because people are referred to us from all over.”
Doctors Higgins and Michael McClinton will spend about eight to 10 hours today trying to create a left ring finger from one of Hector?s toes. Using bones from his toes, they also will extend additional fingers.
With two fingers and one thumb, Hector will have a pinching motion with that hand, Higgins said. “We can take an additional full toe and give him a second finger, but usually these operations are staged separately.”
Giving Hector a ring finger, as opposed to an index finger, will help him grasp larger objects, Higgins said.
