14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this month, a team of surgeons operated on a young boy born with three arms and successfully removed the extra limb that was attached to his body. The child is now feeling much better and should soon make a full recovery.
In fact, the specialists handling this bizarre medical case expect that, despite having been born with three arms instead of just two, the boy will grow to become a perfectly healthy adult and will lead a normal life.
How the boy got his third arm
Specialists say that the baby boy, whose name has not yet been made public, was born with an extra limb attached to the left side of his body because of a rare medical condition known to the scientific community as polymelia.
They go on detail that this condition boils down to abnormal embryonic development. In a nutshell, an embryo that should have grown into conjoined twins instead develops into just one child whose body has parts of their twin attached to it.
As explained by researchers who have taken the time to study this disorder, cases of polymelia are few and far between. Hence, whenever a child sporting more than two arms and two legs is born, the event gets a lot of media attention.
Not the easiest surgical intervention in the books
Information shared with the public says that the baby boy, born to a diamond worker living in the city of Bhavnagar in India, was operated on this past December 17. The intervention was carried out at the Ahmedabad Civil Hospital in the state of Gujarat and lasted several hours.
Despite being just two weeks old when surgeons sedated him and cut off his extra limb, the boy managed to pull through. He is now well on the road to recovery and the doctors looking after him believe that he will soon feel well enough to return home to his family.
Still, it looks like the child is not completely out of the woods. Thus, while examining him, surgeons found that he is missing one of his kidneys and has a club foot. The good news is that a plaster is expected to fix his leg problem, and there is no reason that having just one kidney should drastically affect his life in the years to come.
“We have a daughter. We were hoping for a baby boy to complete our family and were happy when our son was born. But when we came to know about his condition, we were worried – all we wanted was a healthy baby. However the doctors have assured us our son will be alright,” the boy's father told the press in an interview, as cited by DM.
