Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand: Amniotic band syndrome

To see a world in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

William Blake

This is what your hand looks like if you’re born with amniotic band syndrome.  The thought is that it happens when there’s a partial rupture of the amniotic sack and the hand gets caught up in it.  It’s supposed to be purely mechanical.  But: amniotic band syndrome often co-occurs with other congenital anomalies that aren’t even possibly remotely mechanically related, such as cleft lip and cleft palate.  This leads to another theory about where amniotic band syndrome comes from, which is that it’s related to some kind of circulatory disorder that can affect both the digits and the developing palate.

In a region where people don’t typically get very much education and the most common way of supporting yourself is manual labor, a person who isn’t treated for this congenital defect can pretty easily find themselves in a life of poverty without an obvious way out.  That means a childhood of poverty for their kids, too.  That’s a lot of suffering.

You might be thinking: having amniotic band syndrome would suck, but there’s nothing that I can do about all of those little kids who are born with it.  I’m happy to tell you: that’s not true!

There’s a group called Surgicorps that goes to various and sundry places around the world to do free surgeries for the most destitute of the destitute.  There are lots of groups like that, but there’s something special about Surgicorps: they have a hand surgeon.  The goal of surgery for something like amniotic band syndrome is to restore function to the hand.  Doing this is difficult, and requires a lot of very specialized training–the Surgicorps hand surgeon did fellowships in both plastic surgery and orthopedics.  (For doctors, a fellowship is advanced training that you do after your residency if you want to develop very specialized skills.  A fellowship can easily be five years long, and that’s on top of four years of college, four years of medical, and a three-year residency.)

Where you fit into this: Surgicorps does its work entirely on the basis of donations.  The surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, technicians, interpreters (I’m one of them), and others all donate their time, pay for their own travel expenses, and pay for their lodging.  Surgicorps pays for all aspects of the patients’ treatment–the surgical equipment and supplies, housing for the parents while the kid is hospitalized afterwards, the anesthesia, medications–everything.  That money comes from charitable donations.

That’s where you come in!  In the days to come, I’m going to hit you up for a donation.  I’ll tell you more about what Surgicorps does, tell you about some of the people we treat (within the bounds of privacy), and try to give you a bit of the feel of what it’s like to be in Guatemala.

Language stuff: I work closely with our hand surgeon, which means that I need to know a lot of terms related to the kinds of feelings that you might have in your hands and fingers.  Here are some of those words, in English, Spanish, and of course French.  Scroll down past them for notes on the English in this post.  Spoiler alert: in the English section, I’ll be talking about the verb to cleave, the noun digit, and the idiom to come in.

• cleft: this is the past participle of the super-interesting verb to cleave.  What’s cool about to cleave: it is its own opposite.  That is to say: it has two meanings, and they are each other’s opposites.  (Quotes from http://www.quotationspage.com, http://www.brainyquote.com, http://www.mechon-mamre.org, Jewish Publication Society, and http://www.sattor.com.)
  • One meaning of to cleave is to forcefully split something, or (intransitively) to split, especially along a natural line.  This is the origin of the name of the kind of heavy knife called a cleaver. 
    • One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.  Aldo Leopold.
    • Hamlet thou has’t cleft my heart in twain.  Shakespeare, Hamlet.
      
    • I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he’s made of sugar.  George Saunders. 
    • When I was at Babbo, I was covered in scars and scabs and burned bits – melted hair, ribbed burns I got reaching across the top of a hot skillet… I sliced off the tip of my finger. I cleaved my forehead – a deep, ugly wound. Luckily, it regenerated.  Bill Buford
    • Like Honeycrisp, SweeTango has much larger cells than other apples, and when you bite into it, the cells shatter rather than cleaving along the cell walls, as is the case with most popular apples. The bursting of the cells fills your mouth with juice. Chunks of SweeTango snap off in your mouth with a loud cracking sound.  John Seabrook.  (This is the intransitive use.)
      Cupid’s arrow, Hafiz’s heart tore and cleaved
      I see his verses, with their wet ink, bleed.  Khajeh Shamseddin Mohammad Hafiz Shirazi
  • The other meaning of to cleave is to stick to something.
    • Cleave to no faith when faith brings blood.  Arthur Miller, The crucible. 
    • She counted to ten as she had been taught when about to deliver a big speech, but when she tried to force some words of outrage from between her teeth her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth and the most she could do was make a small cry of protest deep in her throat. (British National Corpus.  Like that past tense?  J’adore!)
    • We all are originally sinners as Adam and in Adam, his leprosy cleaving faster to us than Naaman’s did to Gahazai, so that even the infant, before it has seen the light of the world, has this blemish inherent in its unborn members.  John Wycliffe.  (A little language/interpretation connection: Wycliffe Bible Translators, the biggest Bible-translating group in the world, is named after John Wycliffe.)
    • Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.  God, Genesis 2:24.
       תִּדְבַּק-לְשׁוֹנִי, לְחִכִּי–    אִם-לֹא אֶזְכְּרֵכִי: Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I remember thee not.  Psalms 137:6.
  • I ran into this example in the British National Corpus, and I have no idea whatsoever what it means: The horse shied a little and the butt cleaved into the side of my head, almost taking my ear off.
• digit: you know that this can mean a number, but it can also mean a finger or toe.  From the post: This leads to another theory about where amniotic band syndrome comes from, which is that it’s related to some kind of circulatory disorder that can affect both the digits and the developing palate.
  • Painful, rapidly growing tumor in the subungual area of the first digit of the right hand.  Perelló-Alzamora et al.
  • Surgical amputation of the digit: an investigation into the technical variations among hand surgeons.  Li et al.
• to come in: this idiom has a few meanings.  Here’s the definition for the way that I used it, from Merriam-Webster: to assume a role or function <that’s where you come in>.  From the post: That’s where you come in!  In the days to come, I’m going to hit you up for a donation.