Emmett's Right Thumb

Well, here's a story about Emmett's right thumb. A couple weeks ago, I was counting his fingers at church when I noticed that his right thumb couldn't straighten all the way, and his left thumb could. I thought it was strange. And thought maybe he had broken it. But I couldn't imagine that he had broken it and had never cried about it. He didn't care if you touched and played with it, until you put some pressure on it to try to straighten it out. So I just wondered maybe he was born that way? It bothered me a lot, so I began to look back at pictures to see if he really was born that way. It turns out that it wasn't born that way. It's perfectly straight and normal in the pictures up until last October. I have pictures of him right before the deer hunt and its normal, and then pictures just after the deer hunt that its bent. And its bent from then on. This made me feel like a horrible parent for not noticing until 3 months later! The only excuse I have is that he never complained about it. It never seemed to bother him!

So off to the doc we go. Spent 3 hours there. X-rays were taken and showed that the bone was not broken. The doctor concluded that he has a torn tendon in the thumb that is called mallet thumb or hammer thumb. His tendon on the top side of his thumb was somehow torn leaving the tendon on the bottom to get tighter with no opposite force. Which makes the thumb stay bent always. The doctor said this is extremely rare for anybody to have on the thumb, especially an infant. Below is a picture of how it was.

This next picture shows the difference between the two thumbs.
The doctor said that if we do nothing, the thumb will become completely curled up, gnarled, and unusable. So now, Emmett goes to physical therapy to help stretch the bottom tendon in the thumb so that we can completely straighten the thumb like normal and then it will be either splinted or casted for a month to see if the torn tendon heals. If that doesn't work then a surgery will need to be done. So this is a picture of him after going to the doctor and the physical therapist. After just one session with the physical therapist we were able to get it stretched and straightened enough to splint it.

And this is a picture I took of him yesterday. After the splint kept falling off I had to wrap it more like a cast around his wrist. It is now staying on. We may get it casted at the next appointment if it is straight enough. I really hope that this works. I really don't want my baby to have to go through another surgery. But his green thumb is really cute! : ) And he's been such a happy boy while going through this!