• Weight: 281.5
• BP: 128/80

For the longest time, puppy has known about his personal ailments, but hasn’t always had names for them. Certain ones like HBP (High Blood Pressure) or Astigmatism were easy to decipher, but something like Congenital Radioulnar Synostosis; while not only being a mouthful, takes some explanation before someone can better understand it.

In puppy’s case, he’s not really certain when it first became apparent that he wasn’t able to do things all the other kids could do, but one thing that he most definitely could not do was place his hand palm up. Nope, never could do that. Not even a concept of how that would be done. Palm down, no problem. Palm up, that’s where the trouble starts. Think of your hand, palm down. Got that mental picture? Good. Now begin to turn your hand slowly…yep, a little more, now it’s gone from horizontal to vertical. Keep turning a little more…and stop. That’s as far as puppy’s hands turn. Any more and it’s going to be painful.

When puppy was a little nipper, his parents took him to a specialist (orthopedist) and asked if something could be done to fix puppy’s arms so that he could extend his palm upward. All puppy remembers of all that is a conversation his mother had with him afterward, and the answer was no, there wasn’t anything that could be done, puppy was just going to have to figure out things for himself through life, and come up with solutions in his own way when it came time to need to do things with his hand palm upwards. puppy’s mother told him that he was ‘hinged’ in this way and that was ok, it just made him different from everyone else…though puppy went through most of his life thinking that he was particularly unique in this instance. With the advent of the internet, a few times puppy would throw his problem into the search engine and always there never seemed to be anything written about it. Though probably puppy wasn’t wording it correctly, since there are articles he’s found 10-12 years old…so it’s not so rare a thing as he once thought.

puppy always wanted to learn to play the banjo. Unfortunately, with the way his arms and hands are ‘hinged’, he can’t reach the frets with enough fingers to do the chords correctly. He even went to a local music store and spoke to the owner, who happens to play the instrument himself. After puppy explained the problem, he tried to recreate how puppy would have to hold the banjo and told puppy it wouldn’t be possible with the lack of radial movement. No matter how high puppy could lift the neck of the banjo, it would end up being too uncomfortable and puppy still couldn’t fret the notes correctly, it’s just not within his range of motion. A bit of a downer, since puppy now has 2 banjos that he can’t play.

puppy has been kicking around the idea of seeing a local orthopedist and seeing if there’s been any progress in the past 40 years, perhaps there’s a method that can be used to give him more of a range of motion, but then probably puppy would have to relearn to do all the things that he does in his own manner. So it might be trading one set of problems for another..time will tell.

All the little things most people take for granted..puppy doesn’t