New Discovery

Hi,

I'm Camilla, a student living in London, currently studying Broadcast Post Production at Ravensbourne.
The thing that makes me different? The fact that I was born with only my left arm and partial above elbow stump on my right. I've never had a definitive answer as to why I am the way I am, only speculation (mostly related to the fact that I was born 3 months premature). However, I count my lucky stars as my twin sister wasn't as fortunate and passed away after 10 days. So I chose to suck it up and get on with it, instead of letting it define who I am, I embraced it and rolled with the punches. It's been one helluva roller-coaster let me tell you.

Ever since I was a baby I've had a prosthetic arm, they were very basic back then, only having the option to open and close my 'hand' through muscle movement in my stump. This was extremely limiting (it was too strong to hold unstable things such as yoghurt pots and water bottles etc. I found them heavy and threw my balance out. All in all they were a hindrance - I couldn't use a ruler anymore, couldn't cut my food as I had without it. So at the age of 15 I stopped getting functional prosthetics and went for a cosmetic one. An arm to just hang at my side and fulfill the missing visual gap. This stopped the staring, but again, I found it incredibly difficult to adapt to and not get in the way of my way of doing things. After a year I stopped wearing it altogether and to this day, 6 years on, I haven't worn one.
For a while now I've been researching into functional prosthetics to see what advances had been made. I struggled to find ones that were geared towards people who had been born without limbs. Instead, they all seemed to be for amputees, operating on their ghost nerve endings and muscle impulses to operate them in terms of movement. I was starting to feel frustrated as although I'm used to the staring and questions, going to university and meeting so many new people really threw me back into the feelings and insecurities I had as a child.

I kept up the search, every couple months re-checking the situation when I stumbled upon a company with a prosthetic model that came out in 2007, with a new model released more recently, which created the world's first powered prosthetic hand with articulating digits. (More on this to follow).
I was super excited to see this so I emailed them regarding the prosthetic, whether I'm eligible to be fitted with one...

I'M ELIGIBLE!