She dreamed about this moment. But when she woke up, she couldn’t be sure if it was anything more than a dream, until she got to school and her principal assured her that, yes, she would indeed be getting a new right hand.
And so Ana Del Hoyo-Quiñones, a pigtailed, 9-year-old fourth-grader at Denver Center of International Studies at Fairmont, stood wide-eyed in the school library one evening last week as a man entered, placed a small case on a table and opened it.
He presented her a mechanical device — a skeletal, plastic prosthetic that Ana immediately slipped onto her right arm, fitting her own partially formed hand into the palm. Almost intuitively, she flexed her wrist and watched thin cords draw the artificial fingers and thumb together. She picked up a small object from the table.
“I think it’s awesome,” Ana said, “because I can feel how it is having hands with fingers and doing the things I wanted to do.”
It did not bother her in the least that the prosthetic was actually a left hand — the result of a miscommunication that will be fixed easily. In the meantime, Ana playfully shook hands and exchanged high-fives with family and school staff members, grasped any available object and threaded the fingers of her left hand through the plastic digits of the new device.
Overcome by her daughter’s excitement, Alma Quiñones-Mayorga left the room fighting back tears of joy.
She has never fully understood why Ana was born this way, beyond a vague notion that she may have been resting on her right hand in the womb. Ana endured painful surgery at four months to pry her thumb apart from the rest of her partially formed hand. Skin was grafted from her abdomen to complete the process.
Her mother opted out of a follow-up operation to further separate Ana’s tiny fingers rather than have her deal with more pain.
Vanessa Lugo-Acevedo, a bilingual assistant principal at DCIS who translated for the Spanish-speaking mother, also wept as she explained why the experience proved so powerful.
“For her to be able to witness a moment where Ana was able to gain the abilities that most children have to throw a ball, to hold a cup, without seeing Ana experience pain — I think is just overwhelming,” she said.
Created in a garage
The delivery had been about two months in the planning.
Clay Guillory, a 27-year-old mechanical engineer from Colorado Springs, drove to Denver to personally present Ana with the device that he created in his garage workshop.
But the chain of events began with DCIS principal Anne Jacobs seeing a post on social media about a group that links people who would like prosthetic hands with volunteers who can help make it happen.
E-Nable describes itself as a global community, a nonprofit organization of diverse individuals and institutions who work to provide relatively simple mechanical hands via the rapidly expanding power of 3-D printing. It was inspired by a movie-monster maker in Washington and an artist in South Africa who connected over the Internet to create a design.
They made it available to anyone, in the spirit of open-sourcing that breeds collaborative improvement upon the original.
When Jacobs first learned of the e-Nable prosthetics, she immediately thought of Ana but debated whether it was even appropriate for her to broach the subject with Ana’s mother.
“I see Ana as perfect the way she is,” Jacobs said. “But I thought about the opportunities she could have if she had fingers and could grasp things.”
So she consulted Quiñones-Mayorga, who didn’t want Ana to think she needed a prosthetic.
“I’ve raised her to really appreciate the way in which God sent her to me,” she told the principal, adding her concern about how her daughter would adapt to this new opportunity.
“Ana has this beautiful confidence about her, where she lets people know that she was born with her beautiful hand that she has now,” said Lugo-Acevedo. “She paints her nails and is never ashamed to have both hands on the table. She rides her bike like any little one, even if it’s with one hand. It speaks volumes about mom and how much she loves her daughter, how she has built self-confidence in her and empowered her to advocate for herself.”
After tearful conversations, they brought Ana into the discussion. When she expressed nothing but excitement at the idea, the project was set in motion: They filled out an application to e-Nable and took photos of Ana’s right hand next to a yardstick, to illustrate its dimensions.
Just a couple of days later, Ana was matched with Guillory, who would volunteer his time, rev up his 3-D printer and absorb the $50 cost of materials to make the device.
Ana chose the model, settling on a popular option called the “Cyborg Beast.” Then she decided on a color: pink.
But even a much-anticipated prosthetic seems unlikely to drastically alter Ana’s self-image.
At the beginning of the year, Leeann Sain’s fourth-grade class participated in an activity focused on things that make each student different. They crafted “All About Me” T-shirts to illustrate their unique traits. On her shirt, Ana drew her abbreviated right hand.
She calls it her “special hand.”
Even now, Sain has to pause to remember which hand is which.
“You’d never know she has a limitation with her right hand,” Sain said. “It just doesn’t come up. She treats it like it’s able to do everything. She holds books, turns pages. I’ve never seen her hide her hand out of shyness, or put it behind her back. She seems like she walks around very proud with the hand she was born with.”
Ana told her teacher that the mechanical device wouldn’t make her real hand any less special.
“I think she gets it,” Sain said. “There’s a lot that she wants to do, and that’s what makes her excited. But she also understands that, just because she gets a prosthetic, that doesn’t devalue the hand she has now.
“It makes Ana, Ana.”
Guillory’s fourth hand
Guillory, who works for Diversified Machine Systems and makes and uses custom 3-D printers in his own venture, Titan Robotics Ltd., launched himself into the manufacturing process.
He first got involved with e-Nable in July, when a Colorado mom saw his online ad for 3-D printing and asked if he could make a robotic hand for her son.
“I started to look into it,” he said, “and saw a whole group of volunteers all over the world that do these things.”
Guillory, who moved to Colorado from Louisiana two years ago, eagerly joined their ranks. Ana’s hand marks the fourth he has manufactured. He’s about to start working on another hand for a boy in Atlanta, and his employer has pledged to help with a more elaborate, electronic model for a boy whose arm ends at the elbow.
“It’s gratifying,” Guillory said. “You spend a decent amount of time on this, and all the effort is worth it when you see the smile on a kid’s face.”
He determined the scale of Ana’s device from photos and measurements she submitted. From there, it took about 26 hours to manufacture the parts through the 3-D printing process, which employs a computer program to produce layer after layer of the design in plastic.
Over another four hours, he sanded and polished the finished pieces to remove excess material and used a chemical process to smooth out the surfaces. Thin, tendon-like cords that move the fingers and enable the device to grasp were sized and threaded through hand-drilled holes.
Once assembled, the hand provides a rudimentary and relatively inexpensive alternative to high-tech robotic devices that can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
“You can pick up things, ride a bike, play baseball or softball,” Guillory said. “It gives you about 60 percent of what you can do with a normal hand. It’s not as precise — you can’t play the piano. But it all depends on how good they get with it.”
Sitting across from Ana at a library table, Guillory walked her through the Cyborg Beast’s capabilities and limitations.
While it could be helpful in riding her bike, he noted, she should practice first in a safe environment before hitting the streets. He reminded her that the hand was plastic and therefore hardly indestructible.
“Don’t punch things — it’ll break,” he cautioned. “And it’s going to be very tough to learn how to write with this. You might be able to do it, but it’s very tough.”
As Ana imagined how the device might change her life, she had thought first of swinging on the monkey bars — not an option, Guillory warned — but second of writing. She has written holding a pencil in either hand, although the left produces slightly more legible printing. Already, she had written a letter to Jacobs, in her adopted English language, thanking her for “opening new dors in my live.”
Now, with her new pink appendage, she envisioned writing another letter.
“To Clay,” she said. The difficulty of gripping a pencil with a prosthetic seemed a minor obstacle to expressing her gratitude.
Later, as everyone dined on take-out pizza and pasta at library tables, Guillory sat next to Ana’s mother, who still appeared emotionally drained by the engineer’s gesture to her daughter.
She offered a question in Spanish.
“She wants to know,” translated Lugo-Acevedo, “if it’s OK to give you another hug.”
Kevin Simpson: 303-954-1739, ksimpson@denverpost.com or twitter.com/ksimpsondp
3D-Printed Prosthetic
