On Wednesday I tried on my new prosthetic arm at Hanger for the first time. It really brings you face-to-face with your disability to see this chunk of plastic and metal attached to your arm. I’d got quite use to just not having my left had up until now – it’s going to take a while to get use to this I’m sure.

My prosthetic is a mechanical device, the carbon composite socket attached to my arm over the gel sleeve I put on, staying put by suction alone. The claw attached to the end of the socket and has a cable that opens it and rubber bands that close it (I can adjust the number of bands depending on the force I want). The cable is attached to a harness that goes behind my back and over my right shoulder. I open the claw by either moving my arm forward or flexing my right shoulder…pretty primitive but effective so I am told. Unfortunately the cable rubbed on my arm, so Richard has to add a sleeve to the top of the socket so he can run the cable up a bit higher…I was close to taking my new arm home, but just one more adjustment to make.

I can get different attachments for the socket, there’s one that looks like a hand for a more cosmetically appealing look, for example. I’m also looking to get attachments so I can ride a bike again (push bike for now), get back in the gym and lift weights and even play guitar (I’ll have to learn to play left-handed though!). Next week I should be able to take it home and start experimenting.

Excuse the pun, but I thought I’d take the chance to shamelessly plug Kaboodle since we just released the biggest update yet to our site. It’s been great to be back in the thick of it after my accident back in Feb. The release has been keeping everyone busy for the last 8 weeks as we’ve feverishly worked on a whole list of new features…the last 2 weeks have been the longest days (and nights) for everyone.

I’ve been busy developing our core technology that is used to automatically extract and summarize web pages for you. It’s the magic behind the ‘Add To Kaboodle‘ button, most of you won’t even notice it I’m sure…but that’s what makes it magic of course. And in this release we use the input from our users as they add pages to Kaboodle to improve the quality of our extraction over time, so it should just keep getting better!

We added some really cool features in this release that I personally love, one is groups. I have created the ‘Give Us A Hand‘ group where I’ve added all my Kaboodles on all things related to living with one hand. It’s an open group so feel free to join if you have something to add, hopefully it’ll be a useful resource for others.

Anyhow, go check it out and if you haven’t signed up already do it now…you owe me!

Kerry gave me a lovely Tag Heuer watch many years back after we got engaged. I wear it all the time and it was on my wrist when I had my accident.

I remember at the clinic I was first taken to in Colombia that they had to take the pin out of the strap to get it off my wrist, my hand was bunched up and they couldn’t get it over it. I remember the skin peeling away as they took the watch off and then forgot about it since I had other, rather pressing, matters to deal with.

It wasn’t until I was in hospital in Miami that it occurred to me to ask Kerry what happened to my watch. Luckily she had picked everything up at the clinic as we left for the main hospital, so at least it wasn’t lost…however I figured it would be pretty fried by the electricity. The surgeons at Miami had commented on how the burn damage was pretty extensive all around the wrist, the theory being that the watch had conducted the electricity and perhaps contributed to the extensive damage (if you plan on flying into power lines please wear a plastic watch!).

Anyhow, Kerry brought the watch into the hospital and to our amazement it was still working. OK, it smelt of burnt skin and there were tiny bits of blackened skin still in the wrist strap, but apart from some tiny melt marks on the casing it seemed fine. That was until the next day when it suddenly stopped…oh, well what do you expect.

When we finally got back to San Francisco we looked at it again and lo and behold it was working. Once I got back home I took the watch in to be cleaned and it came back as good as new, you’d never know what it had been through (shame the same can’t be said of me). All in all it’s a pretty remarkable watch and who knows, maybe the watch was the reason the electric current didn’t stop my heart and kill me – which is what most doctors expect should have happened when I describe the accident to them. Thanks Tag Heuer!

I still haven’t got my prosthetic hand yet, it’s been a challenge for Richard at Hanger to get a test socket to fit. My stump is a bit bulbous, which, as you can imagine, makes it a challenge to get a socket to go over the bulge in the middle yet still fit snuggly to the stump.

It was third time lucky last week though, Richard successfully created a socket that fitted well. Now he will turn this test socket into a real one made from carbon fiber and then I can start experimenting with the hand attachments to see how they work for me, I’m quite excited to finally get to try something out and see what difference it makes.

Richard kindly took some photos of the process of making the test socket. The first one on the left is the initial mould taken from the cast he made of my arm, it’s pretty rough and has to be sanded down and smoothed out before they can make the socket from it. As you can see they just use a normal file to get rid of the imperfections and to reduce the size of the mould by 3-5%…this is where the skill comes in to reduce the size but not to make it too small that the resulting socket won’t fit. In my case, for the third test, Richard didn’t reduce the size of the mould at all, instead, when he took the cast of my arm he shaped the tissue in my arm while it set.

In this next shot you see them heating the plastic sheet ready to make the socket, notice how it’s bowing down. Then they shape the sheet around the mould and finally apply the vacuum to suck all the air out and create the final result.