Surgeon Creates Fingers for Toddler

Dec. 14, 2010 — -- When Laura Azzopardi gave birth to her son Gavin three years ago, she did what many new parents do, counting his fingers and toes. Gavin had five toes on each foot, but was born with just a pinky and thumb on each hand.

"It was a total shock when I had him," Azzopardi told ABC News. Gavin was born with a congenital hand deformity, a condition with unknown causes.

Laura and her husband Keith were uncertain Gavin would ever have functional hands, until they found an article in People magazine. It was the very day they brought their newborn baby home from the hospital.

The article, "A New Hand for Ryan," introduced the family to the groundbreaking work of Dr. William Seitz, an orthopedic surgeon at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, who was building fingers for another young boy.

After disappointing consultations with two other doctors near their home in Fair Haven, Michigan, the family called Dr. Seitz in Cleveland.

At just 9 months of age, Gavin began a series of treatments and surgeries at Cleveland Clinic aimed at building him two hands that would eventually help him in everyday life.

"He had a thumb and he had a pinky, but the problem was in between he had nothing in the way of fingers. The bone that was intervening between his pinky and his thumb was actually preventing him from getting his thumb and pinky together," Dr. Seitz told ABC News.

Dr. Seitz set out to build two new fingers for Gavin to increase his ability to pick up and grip items.

Creating two additional fingers per hand would require transferring bone for what was to be his middle and ring fingers and reshaping it into index and middle fingers. The new bones were attached to metal lengthening devices which helped them grow.

The process has been long and arduous, but Dr. Seitz said he sees results in his work. After two years of treatment, he said, Gavin's new fingers are "tubes of skin and bone. They've got muscle attachments to them and they've got some tendon attachments and they move."