286: What if you were born without a hand?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. The doctors chose the surgeries that I was undergoing. My parents chose to go along with that. And then by the way they were framing it, above all of them at the top tier of the decision-making process, God had chosen to put all of that in place to begin with.

And all the way down at the bottom of that stack with no agency whatsoever, I was the one dealing with all the consequences of all those cascading decisions. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 286. What if you were born without a hand?

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I was born without my right hand. I've never heard anybody come to any kind of conclusion as to what the cause of that was. It's not part of any known named syndrome.

The kind of prevailing theory that I heard from the doctors growing up was that it could have been a side effect of my mom having a really severe case of shingles during the phase of the pregnancy when the hands and feet are forming. She had a severe fever and was really sick for a while, and then shortly after that they discovered through the prenatal imaging that I didn't have a fully formed right hand. It really just stopped at the wrist.

I know that my parents felt an urgency to come up with some kind of a treatment plan or some kind of a solution. They looked at prosthetics options. The technology that was available then in 1989 was pretty primitive and it didn't look like a very promising route. So they explored reconstructive surgery, which was really going through kind of a trendy period at that point in the early 90s.

So they met with some surgeons just in their exploration of what the best options would be who were based in Louisville, Kentucky. And they were kind of like the superstar reconstructive surgery team of the day. And those surgeons impressed on my parents the need to act quickly because my growth plates would start closing and they needed a lot of runway if they're going to build what they called a helper hand.

The surgeons described this helper hand as being slightly inferior to a fully functional hand, but something that I could do simple tasks with. It would have some opposing digits and, you know, I could grab things and hand them over to my dominant hand. It would definitely be advantageous as they framed it to have sensation. Whereas if I had gone with a prosthetic device, you know, I wouldn't feel what I was touching. There wouldn't be that tactile feedback. So they made the decision very quickly to pursue that route.

That began at 10 months old. I had my first surgery, which was moving the proximal and distal phalanges, the main bones of my second and third toes from my right foot and grafting them onto the end of my arm where they were positioned as kind of like little pincher claws or something.

And that was kind of the beginning of this series of surgeries that would continue at a pretty rapid pace. It was around one every six months from that point forward for the next 16 years of my life. Thinking back to childhood, there was definitely a very positive, loving, reinforcing vibe throughout the home.

What motivated specifically my mom to be so careful and deliberate with creating that kind of an environment was a reaction to negative things that she had experienced herself. Her dad was verbally abusive and kind of a tyrant.

And I know that was a multi-generational theme throughout her family. Like his dad before him, her great-grandfather had been an alcoholic and physically abusive and was just a really terrible person. So then that kind of manifested in the next generation with my grandfather kind of taking out his baggage on her. And I think she just decided at some point that it was going to be a conscious decision in her life to make sure that that didn't continue for another generation.

The way that took form with her, I think, was mostly diving really deep into her religion and into her relationship with my dad. But in addition to that really deliberate effort to make it a loving, safe place, there was also a subtle undertone of mistrust or fear of the outside world, almost like a paranoia that my mom carried with her. It left a noticeable mark on the way she approached life that even as young kids, me and my siblings picked up on.

And she was very preoccupied with the idea of not knowing how long any of us had with each other, you know, like sort of hammering home the idea of mortality and you want to take advantage of every minute you have. Because her brother actually, when she was really young, had died in the Coast Guard. He was the source of peace and was kind of like her refuge within the home from her dad's abuses.

I think it was a big blow to her worldview and to her faith. And she ended up coming out of that even more doubled down on her very staunch Christian worldview and deciding that whatever had happened, it was the will of God. And she was going to carry that philosophy throughout the rest of her life.

It was good, I think, overall to be reminded of the importance of that kind of present moment living and making sure things weren't left unresolved. But there's the obvious flip side of that, which is that as a kid, that can leave you feeling kind of unstable and paranoid, just looking for death around every corner. My dad was definitely a source of stability. You know, he's a very engineer brained kind of person. He was an engineer by trade.

She brings a lot more of the emotional side and I think he brings a lot more of the stabilizing kind of intellectual side and they just really complement each other well. Some of the baggage and some of the events that my mom had gone through had left her with this emphasis on making sure that only positive memories were formed inside of the home. And that extended to all kinds of things from always having us eat dinner around the table together to reading out loud from a book that we'd be going through.

And another theme that was extremely prevalent throughout that was their devotion to their religion. I think out of every Christian I've ever met, they're probably among the most devout. They inform absolutely every decision they make in their daily life within that context. I had three siblings and my older sister had some learning difficulties that manifested pretty quickly after she went to school as a little kid.

After struggling through that for a couple of years, they made the decision to bring her home and teach her at home. And then shortly after that decision, it just became kind of a sweeping policy throughout the house that everybody would start their school in a homeschool setting. She's seven years older than I am. And her brief time in public school, having been characterized by some bullying and some difficulties and stuff, was something that was kind of baked into my early understanding of how the world worked.

At a young age, the fact that I had my disability with my hand and then my older sister had her learning disability, I think was mostly a source of bonding for us. It felt like this kind of solidarity that the two of us had. And I felt very few of the real world negative sides of that. But there were definitely a few key moments of bullying when I was little that took me completely off guard.

We were living in an apartment complex when I was probably seven, and some kid from one of the other units made some remark about me having a pig hand and laughed about it.

It was like seeing it with new eyes for the first time. Like I had never really looked at it as a problem because it was something that was just so accepted within the home. And then hearing it compared to something, you know, that was so insulting was kind of a big awakening moment for me. Like, wow, people really do see this as something to mock or something that limits me or makes me different because it's one thing to kind of abstractly hear. Yeah, people can be mean if you're different or whatever. It's another thing to actually come up against it and experience it

Probably the biggest ongoing frustration with it was just watching my older brother do stuff that I couldn't follow him and also do. It just seemed like every year that went by, there would be some new activity or athletic achievement or something that he accomplished that I was just following further and further behind.

It really wasn't until I started hitting my early teenage years that my perception of everything shifted around. And I think I became predominantly resentful and felt just completely inferior. A lot of that had to do with the practical applications of having two hands that I couldn't do. But even more than that, I think it was more the symbolic nature of a hand being

It's a symbol of so many things. You know, a hand represents strength and it can represent intimacy. You use it as a very important communication tool with gesturing while you talk. And I felt really limited and really inferior and kind of alienated. Along the way, as these surgeons were working their way through their treatment plan, the first big surgery they did was the one at 10 months old where they moved those toe bones to my hand.

There were a lot of little kind of incremental progress surgeries that I don't really remember particularly well. And then the next big landmark one they did was when I was seven, they took the entire second toe from my left foot and grafted it onto my wrist where it would kind of like sit in opposition to the original two. And the idea was to build this kind of like three jaw chuck that I could close. But none of those steps ended up working out at all as planned.

the initial two digits that they built with those toes they had no grip strength at all you know one of them could kind of move a small range the other one was effectively dead and would just kind of get carried along by the connective tissue as i would move the first one and then the thumb didn't stay fastened to the bone it kind of floated in the soft tissue on the wrist and so i just had three floppy useless completely ineffective fingers

Then when I was nine, they became concerned that maybe the shortness of the arm was limiting me. So they decided to lengthen my forearm. And the way they did that was with this apparatus called an Alizarov. It's this crazy big piece of hardware that's anchored into your arm.

And you would turn these screws in the outer hardware of this device, and it would pull apart by very small increments every day. And then that gap in the bone that they've spread grows back that millimeter until it's almost sealed back up. And then the next day they do it again. And that one stands out as one of the more painful, one of the more difficult procedures. The toe transfer, I remember the one where they moved the second toe up to my arm,

In order to graft a toe onto a new site, they have to build up kind of a fatty pad, almost like you have at the base of your thumb. So the way they did that was to transfer skin and soft tissue from my right hip.

And in order for that donated tissue to take, you know, and not be rejected, I actually had to spend a period of time with my arm stitched to my hip so that the new circulatory paths from the hip tissue into the arm could form without the tissue being severed from the hip. So I spent a month with my arm stitched to my hip.

During the first few weeks of that recovery, in order to keep my arm from moving in my sleep or from me accidentally tearing the sutures where my arm was sewn to my hip, I had to be pretty much mummified from, you know, my neck down to my waist so that my arm could be like securely fastened.

And that happened during the Christmas season when I was seven. I had been in the hospital for a week. It was like a nine hour surgery on the operating table and then a week of recovery in the hospital. And then I had come home, you know, mummified. And I remember this very vivid memory, this specifically hellish night. I was lying on the couch a couple of days back from the hospital and I started to have this reaction to it. My skin started to break out.

I was lying on the couch, you know, obviously in this like post-surgical pain and they were watching a Christmas movie, the rest of my family was. And this insane histamine itch started all over my body and I couldn't scratch it and I couldn't move because I was mummified. And they were on the phone with the doctors trying to figure out how to help me. And the takeaway from that conversation was that I just kind of had to get through it because I couldn't unwrap it because it would run the risk of damaging the site. So I'm just lying on the couch, just trying to in

induce a sort of out of body altered state to stop thinking about the pain and the itch. There were a lot of moments like that along the way. One of the biggest aspects of what was so difficult to deal with was getting newly acquainted with the new version of my hand at every increment along the way.

The feeling that you have around what, you know, somebody who's in the situation would characterize as like freakish or alienating or making you different from other people. That goes up like tenfold when you start adding the kind of Frankenstein quality that these like surgical additions make to it.

I remember having this recurring thought that if somebody from a future civilization dug up my skeleton, it wouldn't even make sense to them what they were seeing. They wouldn't be able to characterize it as something like, oh, this guy just lost his hand or whatever.

They would think something much more freakish than that because it was like, and of course I want to be careful about using words like that because I would never describe anybody who's dealing with any kind of a disability in that way. But it was how I felt about myself. That was the lens that I looked at myself through and it just got worse and worse over time.

I had such a hard time dealing with it as time went on that it got to a point where I wouldn't even look at it in the mirror. It was such an alien thing to me because not only was it not something that was naturally part of my body, but it was something that was designed and implemented by somebody else without any input from me. It just felt like something that had been imposed on me.

I started wearing exclusively long sleeve shirts pulled over the end of my arm so nobody could see what was happening. And then, you know, that really wasn't just about keeping other people from seeing it. I didn't want to see it myself either. It was like something I wanted to just will off of my body. But whenever you try that hard to will a part of yourself out of existence, I think it's inevitable for that to turn into a pervasive anxiety.

I think everybody can relate to the feeling of a thought that you're trying not to remember. You know, you've got some source of anxiety that you've tried to put out of your head and you can kind of feel it creeping at the periphery of your subconscious and it knots up your stomach and you try to kind of run away from it mentally. That was kind of the state that I lived in all the time. On the surface, you can kind of believe this lie of omission that you're telling yourself that, no, this is not part of me. But it's always there under the surface. And I remember being very paranoid that somebody else would catch a glimpse of it.

Any new people that I met over time, you know, I was always very careful to just tell them that I was missing a hand and only let them see just kind of the clean, empty end of a shirt sleeve. I remember one time at a summer job that I had in high school, a coworker of mine really, you know, was like pestering me and harassing me to show it to them. And like, just, I won't think it's weird. You know, you've always had that long sleeve on. And eventually I wore down and showed it to them.

And it was such a depressing confirmation of the way it looked to people because, you know, there was definitely an effort made to be polite, but you could just see on the face like this reaction of like horror. That was a turning point when I decided like, OK, no matter what the context, nobody's ever going to see this again.

I wanted to just have an arm that ended at the wrist like I had been born with because that was free from all of the negative connotations that I imagined went along with having this flesh experiment attached to me.

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Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co-founder of Angie. And one thing I've learned is that you buy a house, but you make it a home. Because with every fix, update, and renovation, it becomes a little more your own. So you need all your jobs done well. For nearly 30 years, Angie has helped millions of homeowners hire skilled pros for the projects that matter. From plumbing to electrical, roof repair to deck upgrades. So leave it to the pros who will get your jobs done well.

Hire high-quality certified pros at Angie.com. After dealing with the struggles that my sister had in school and then a few years of getting like my surgical treatments under their belts, my parents decided that they were uniquely equipped to offer help to kids who needed families and medical care.

So they went down a very specific kind of niche humanitarian rabbit hole of looking for children who were in countries that did not have particularly advanced medical programs, children who had no parents, and basically going about the process of adopting them, bringing them home, and then helping set them up with whatever medical treatment they may need. There was a little boy in Bolivia who was about a year old at the time. This was in 1998.

He was born without a foot, so they immediately identified him as somebody that they felt this kind of affinity for. They traveled to Bolivia, lived down there for a couple of months, and then brought him home. And then just a couple of years later, they adopted a girl from China, and it sort of snowballed from there.

At the current time, they have adopted 19 children. So in addition to the three siblings that I already had biologically, now it's 23 kids total. That was definitely one of those points in my childhood that stands out as like really leveling up the anxiety and the uncertainty. I think it really accentuated a lot of my self-consciousness as a kid. I already felt like individually I was a spectacle.

I was doing everything I could to not be seen. But as more and more of these children joined the family and became my siblings and the family grew larger and larger, and the fact that all of us had some form or other of physical limitation, the ability to remain inconspicuous, to remain anonymous in a crowd got more and more ridiculously impossible.

And I was no longer homeschooled by high school, which was part of what made some of this stuff more socially complicated. There wasn't that insular quality to the home anymore. I was out with classmates at a private school. By the time I really started becoming aware on a fully conscious level of how much I hated what was happening with my arm, I think there was just a sense that I was already in too deep.

It was just kind of like a classic sunk cost fallacy thing where all this time from my life had already gone into trying to do this. And, you know, the first few years of it were without my awareness at all because I was too young to weigh in or offer an opinion. And then even after I got to an age where I kind of understood what was happening, I was just so naive and so unaware of the repercussions of everything that I didn't have any reason to push back.

And it just seemed like the only way out was through. This ongoing situation that I was stuck in the middle of and saw no way out of was all the result of decisions that other people had made for me. You know, my parents had decided to pursue this surgical option in the first place. And then the surgeons had decided all the minutia of exactly how the surgeries would work.

I started to suspect that maybe there were some career advancement motivations with some of these decisions that were being made about my hand. And it started to seem really unfair to me that they had gotten to make all these decisions that defined all of my waking moments when it was such a small percentage of their life. You know, that combined with this alien feeling that it wasn't part of my body, even in an abstract sense, it wasn't part of my identity. It wasn't something that I had in any way contributed to. I was just along for the ride.

The doctors chose the surgeries that I was undergoing. My parents chose to go along with that. And then by the way they were framing it above all of them at the top tier of the decision making process, God had chosen to put all of that in place to begin with. And all the way down at the bottom of that stack with no agency whatsoever, I was the one dealing with all the consequences of all those cascading decisions.

A key feature of the religious doctrine that my parents subscribed to is a really heavy emphasis on everything that happens being the direct will of God and not only being the direct will of God, but by virtue of being the will of God, it is also unimpeachably good.

The way that actually worked out with my perception of what I was going through was really more to make me feel this kind of prevalent sense of cosmic dread around what else he might will. You know, like if it was his choice to put me in this situation, what else might he have in store from there? My relationship from a young age with the idea of God started to turn very fearful and

I didn't like the idea of all of the negative experiences I was having being the outworking of somebody's plan. It just seemed like there was this unimaginably powerful force that had the ability to kind of put me in whatever bad condition he wanted to, always looming over me and following me everywhere.

While it was always said, you're allowed to be sad about it. You're allowed to question why God would have chosen this for you. The ultimate implication was that at the end of the day, you do need to accept it, though, and you do need to learn to be grateful and embrace the fact that this all knowing, all loving divine being created this plan for you. And also he loves you more than you'll ever know.

It feels a little bit, I guess, insensitive to religious people to frame it this way, but it's exactly the dynamic of like a textbook abusive relationship. I love you. That's why I'm making you suffer.

As you're working through all of the difficulty of accepting not only the physical pain and the things that you're missing out on during the recovery and the uncertainty, but also the psychological impact of how you feel like it reflects on you as a person and the ways that it limits you. As you're dealing with all that, you're supposed to sort of thank this being that put that on you. You're supposed to take that as like a divine choice and celebrate it somehow. That was tough.

Growing up in a household that was very traditionally conservative Christian, along with that go a lot of expectations about what you're going to need to be as you get older and become a man and what masculinity needs to look like. And the ability to have two functional strong arms feels very symbolically core to that whole idea.

Again, having an older brother as a point of comparison, it seemed like he was living into these things that were positioned as not only what was expected, but almost as like a moral good. I just felt like I wasn't positioned to be the man that I was raised to think I should be.

Getting to an age where I was, you know, at the threshold of any kind of sexual awakening was sort of doubly complicated for me because on one side, there was this massive body image hang up that I had where I felt like nobody would ever be attracted to me. And then on the other side, working in coordination with that was this upbringing that was pretty puritanical with regard to that kind of thing.

Don't even think about that side of yourself until somehow a wife is presented to you by God, probably through church. So it was something that I think I really just kind of stifled, not having any sense of confidence at all that anybody would be anything but disgusted with me and also feeling like it would be this huge breach of the doctrine of my family to even explore that.

There was a feeling as they went on that the surgeons were becoming a little bit less directed and a little bit more aimless. It all felt like it was kind of falling apart and I was investing more and more time into just letting them try to fix what they had failed to do correctly the first time around.

At the end of all the surgeries, the head of the surgical team sat us down and just really frankly and really gravely told us that they had kind of run out of options and that, you know, my growth plates were closed and there wasn't really much more they could do. And so what I had been dealing with since my last big surgery was really where they were going to have to leave it. They didn't have anything else planned.

When they told me that they had had basically as much success as they ever would and that we were going to stop, that took away the unknown, which can be a hopeful thing. The reason that I was able to stay positive and keep going and not completely given to bitterness and resentment was that I could kind of turn to that unknown. But then it was really sprung on me at age 16 that, no, we're done.

This is what you have, and there's not going to be any further progress on it. That really feeble little thread of optimism that I'd been able to hold on to in the dark times up to that point was just taken away with those words. And I felt just massively betrayed.

The drive home, it was about two hours back from the hospital to our place. I just remember being deeper and deeper, just sinking into this place of despair. Like, okay, I'm going to go home and I'm going to get dressed for bed. And the arm that is waiting for me when I do that is the arm that I'm always going to have.

This is it now. This thing that I've been trying to pretend isn't there. I've kind of left it on this indefinite pause because it's not what I am. It's not what my arm is. It's a transitional state into what my arm is becoming. Well, that's not true anymore. I've got to just look ahead to a lifetime of pretending it's not there.

Being 16, you're almost never going to find anybody with the emotional maturity and stability at that age to process even pretty standard frustrations. It's a time when you're pretty quick to go to anger and go to resentment. And that's absolutely what I did. The lens through which I looked at life was just much darker and much less hopeful than

The version of my hand that I was left with at the end of the surgeries from the outside didn't look particularly different than how it had since I was eight. It was still two heavily scarred, lumpy fingers on the top side of the wrist and then the one toe on the underside of the wrist.

I had a few areas where there was very limited sensation because of the scar tissue. So I couldn't tell always, you know, what was happening with it. I still saw it as this freakish Frankenstein mad science experiment. But now it was something that it was even more important for me to try to find some way to come to terms with as part of me.

Somehow I have to resolve this mental conflict of this very much not feeling like my hand, not feeling like me, but also undeniably being me now. And that was too big of a reconciliation for me to know how to approach that.

So I just got much more dedicated to the identity of like an angry, resentful, rebellious person because it was like, well, if I don't want to be defined as the guy with the Frankenstein arm, I'm going to need to be defined as something else. I had this recurring thought that, you know, maybe I would try to regain some control over this by staging an accident wherein I would cut the portion of my arm that had all the additions off.

There were some woodworking tools in our basement. We had some power saws and stuff. And I like to go down there and work on projects. And I remember thinking while I was doing that, and it would be so quick to just accidentally feed this board into the bandsaw a little bit wrong.

I obviously didn't do it, but it was such a recurring thought, you know, every time I was down there. Because I really did believe that I would be happier at least having something that made sense as just a lost limb, as opposed to this thing that had this entire long convoluted narrative attached to it. And there was something about the idea of choosing it too. Like I can actually have some power over the situation if I just affect this change to my arm.

And there was a time in high school where that kind of evolved into, okay, well, do I just end my life then? That's another way that I could take control over this. Alcohol definitely became part of that. And that got worse and worse through college.

There was something alluring about it, even beyond the fact that, you know, getting drunk allowed you to escape. Like, if I'm going to be dysfunctional, if I'm going to feel like there's no way for me to fit in, at least I can put this self-destructive slant on it and at least present myself as if this is something that I'm choosing. So being a guy who drinks to a problematic amount is something that you can kind of try to spin as an act of rebellion.

Social life for me during this period was really minimal. I enrolled in a fine arts program and I didn't really do anything to pursue any friendships with my classmates in college and, you know, just keep to myself.

After college, I got a job at a company where there was a lot of close collaboration with people. And it put me in a position where it was harder for me to just sort of like be a recluse. And it forced me to sort of come out of this willful social hibernation that I was in, in which I wasn't just avoiding other people, but I was also avoiding ever having any moments of really frank honesty with myself about who I was.

I was like turning and looking directly at this arm that had driven this huge wedge between me and being able to connect with anybody else in my life. And on the other side of doing that, the honesty that I was able to muster really brought home such a huge backlog of pain that had just been kind of put to the side.

And they don't ever really go away. It's like the moment that you feel them five years later is just as strong as it would have been if you had just gotten that out of the way and felt them in the first place. Like they don't get any smaller while they're waiting to be seen.

So around the same time, I met somebody through a work outing. You know, a friend of mine organized this bike ride bar crawl. And I was pretty intimidated to accept the invitation because riding a bike was one of the things that was a little bit difficult with one hand. Because I was kind of trying to motivate this self-honesty and this evolution that I was going through, I went and ended up that night meeting a girl.

We hit it off when we were talking that night and before long we were dating. I still wasn't in a place where I was comfortable letting anybody specifically see my arm. And it can be very awkward to navigate sex and sexuality in general when you're insistent on keeping your arm invisible throughout the process. And bringing that topic up with her, it was something that I had never done with anybody before.

So it was terrifying. But one of the things that worked so well with her is that she was very comfortable living in this kind of awkward space of I'm obviously not OK with this aspect of myself. I'm not OK sharing it with her fully. And she didn't push me to be ready to share that before I was ready. And she wasn't freaked out by the fact that I wasn't sharing it.

It was such a huge moment for me. Like that was probably the biggest relief I've experienced at any step of this process. And what came out of that was a determination to do something about it. I realized the only way to resolve this is to actually now put in the effort to make my own decision about how to move forward with it. You know, what I really wanted was something that would allow me to get rid of the hand that they had built. And I didn't know if I would be able to find anybody who would be willing to do that.

It did become pretty clear through just very brief initial research that you can't really find surgeons who will do that. I mean, you have to make a really strong case for how you would benefit from it. And I couldn't figure out how to put that into language that a surgeon would agree with.

I found it really frustrating that the detriment and the harm that I was experiencing on a daily basis, you know, just going through life minute by minute, having this thing was decreasing my quality of life quantifiably. But the way the medical world frames their approach to these kinds of corrective procedures, they wouldn't use that same metric. And so there wasn't any way for me to make that case.

One of the things that I found as I was looking around online was this YouTube video of a guy using a robotic hand that was called an iLamb.

And it had individually moving fingers and he was doing all these household tasks with it that like, you know, it was the kind of stuff that I had dreamed of being able to do the whole time I was going through these surgeries, the kinds of stuff that the surgeons had indicated I would be able to do. But here's this guy doing it and seeing this video of this guy using this ILM was like the fuel on the fire to really make this happen.

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Having gone through so many surgeries with a positive outcome having been promised and then watching that all fall apart had definitely built up this kind of instinct to resist optimism.

So I ended up approaching a clinician and in talking with him, it actually became apparent pretty quickly that fitting me with a prosthetic arm would be clinically a lot easier to do. It would be much easier to design a device for me if I didn't have that extra length and mass on the arm that came from the hand that they had built.

I was cautioned at the time, you know, he told me like, we're going to have to approach this in a certain order. We're going to need to get the surgery approved and done before we necessarily know for sure whether insurance is going to cover this specific advanced robotic hand that you want. Are you okay with the idea of taking that irreversible step with some uncertainty still being on the table as far as, you know, what you end up using?

And I think that was just about the quickest yes I've ever said in my life. I was like, of course I am. Yes, let's do this. Let's move forward right now. And within a year, I had gone and had it removed. Having it removed not only has not been a source of regret, but I have nightmares about not having done it. And that's all there is to it. Like it's a bad dream and I wake up in a sweat. And the only thing that happened in the dream was I looked over and my arm had that hand back on the end of it.

It stands out in my mind as such a powerful testament to what a relief that was. I couldn't believe how much less concerned I was about it after it was amputated. Couldn't believe how much more normal and natural I felt just having my arm end at the wrist.

It's kind of hard for me to even understand it now, but something so massively overpowering grew in my mind attached to all of that surgical mass that they built up that at the end of the day, I don't even think it really was about not having a hand anymore. I think it was just about not being okay with what people had built for me.

And then amazingly, this really doesn't happen very often, but within a short time, they did approve this iLim hand that I wanted. And so by early 2014, I had been fitted with it and it has been just incredibly life-changing.

It's been so much more functional than anything I ever imagined I'd have available to me. But layered on top of that, and in some ways to me almost more important than that, is the fact that when people look at me wearing it, you know, it looks like a piece of robotic hardware. It's not an attempt to look natural. It's robotic. And it's immediately obvious that this is something that I voluntarily put on.

Everything that was being forced on me, everything I was being cautioned to do was all about approximating a normal, natural hand, about making my body more whole. And that's what all the efforts of all those surgeries was about.

Contrasting that with where I am now, having an arm that is made of carbon fiber and titanium, while everybody who was making those decisions for me along the way would consider that a step away from wholeness, I really do feel so much more whole without it than I ever did with it. Now I actually have another functional hand and I love the way it looks.

I have complete ownership of this decision. Like I can be completely comfortable having people walk up and ask me about it. And it's such a cool thing to see people doing that because the fact that they're comfortable bringing it up and asking me about it means that they don't see it as something that I'm embarrassed of.

to go from something that you're mortified somebody might notice, might ask you about, you're mortified that you might have to talk about it or show it to somebody, to this thing that you're kind of excited to explain to people. You know, it's this thing that I love talking about.

That has really trickled down to every aspect of how I feel about life. You know, there's obviously still a lot of old emotional scarring and emotional baggage that I'm going to be working through for a long time still. I'm still trying to get to a place where my relationship with alcohol and other substances is healthy and not a crutch.

I'm still trying to recover from some of the resentment and the anger that I had over those years. But my outlook in general, I think has just flipped completely around. Those years that I spent between age 16 and age 23, just kind of resigned to my fate is just a memory at this point. The fact that I'm able to look at that in hindsight now makes me so much more tuned into, so much more dialed into other people who might be experiencing similar things and gives me so much empathy for them.

The company that makes the hand that I wear has actually offered me opportunities to talk to patients, you know, recent amputees, stuff like that on a number of occasions. You know, there'll be kids who have just lost their hands or sometimes service members who have come back after losing limbs at war or things like that. And they're looking for just any recommendations from people who have gone through it. And I get to talk to them about my experiences. I get to go kind of be like a first point of contact with people who are trying to figure out what they want to do.

One of the things that I always stress to people is like, make sure that anybody's advice, even whatever advice I may give you, aligns with what you actually want before you take any steps forward with it. It doesn't matter what those people say if it doesn't align with what they actually want for their own outcome.

A lot of the fear and anxiety and resentment that existed around my thoughts on God pretty naturally melted away as I came more and more to terms with the fact that that's really not what I believe about it. Like that sort of thing only holds power over you if you give it some credence. I'm not dismissing the possibility of a God, but I do feel strongly that the doctrine I was raised in is not one that I am part of anymore.

Those ideas were holding a fear over my head that stepping away formally from those beliefs has really liberated me. The same would be true of the concerns I had over like traditional roles of masculinity. You know, it all kind of started to melt away at the same time.

At this point, I feel completely confident. There's no part of me that thinks like I'm failing to deliver on my potential in one way or another. I don't think that I'm less of a person or less of a man because of the arm that I don't have. And I don't carry any fear of what God might choose to do next, you know, because I just don't engage with him in that way.

I definitely find myself wondering how different my childhood would have been if I had had some way of knowing that this wasn't going to be my reality forever. I try not to think too much in terms of what could have been, but I do feel really sad sometimes when I think about the amount of time that was spent going down a road that led nowhere.

There are lessons that I took from it that I think I never would have learned any other way. Things like empathy, things like awareness of what other people are going through. I think that I'm better at not taking things for granted. But in practical terms, aside from the more abstract life lesson kind of framing, there was no real tangible benefit to any of the cumulative time and pain. There's a big chunk of my childhood that definitely just kind of got consumed by

So those aspects of it, I really do have a lot of grief because I wish that I could know what it feels like to experience childhood without that weight. And I do find myself wishing that there were some way to kind of relay the positivity of where I am now back in time to myself as a kid and just lift that uncertainty.

Today's episode featured Ryan. If you'd like to reach out to him, you can email at ryan.a.20918 at gmail.com. That's ryan.a.20918 at gmail.com.

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