The idea came from a family friend — Have a cast made of the little girl’s arm before surgery, and before it’s replaced with a prosthesis.
The mold would be a reminder, or a memento. Maybe not one that parents Shianne and Adam Hayden would want to look at very often, but they didn’t want to not have the replica, they decided, after some consideration.
“At first, we thought it was strange,” the mother told the communications department at UW-Stout, “but the more we thought about it, we thought we might regret it if we didn’t do it.”
The girl, Delainey Hayden — just 18 months old when an art professor at UW-Stout made the cast in early November — might want to see what her arm had looked like, years later. A rare soft-tissue cancer called synovial cell sarcoma had necessitated the amputation, which was performed on Nov. 15 at a hospital in Madison. The only other option was a severe course of radiation that would have eventually deprived the girl’s hand of most of its functioning and left a higher risk of the cancer coming back.
The plan is for the family, which lives in Sparta, Wis., to travel to Shriners Hospital in Minneapolis after Delainey has recovered to begin working with doctors on fitting the prosthesis.
Full report from UW-Stout here.
(photo by UW-Stout)
