Asha was extremely upset. She had undergone a difficult surgery to remove a lump from her armpit and subsequently had been faced with an injury to one of the nerves supplying her arm. Her hand had developed a wrist drop. As a result, she found it impossible to eat with her fingers or write with her right hand. Physiotherapy had helped but only upto a point.
She had been suggested a nerve transplant surgery to try and regain the lost functions of her hand. But she was quite perturbed by the thought of such a major surgery. Finally her doctors guided her to a hand surgeon. He did a thorough examination of her arm and hand and came up with an extremely novel suggestion. Tendon transfer surgery.
What is a tendon? A tendon is the strong fibrous rope-like terminal part of a muscle, that attaches the muscle to a bone. Tendons allow us to move our bones and so move our fingers and various parts of our limbs. Some of our bones, fortunately, have more than one muscle attached to them, doing the same movement. So, to put it simply, we have an additional muscle with tendon. So, if we detach this one muscle and tendon and transfer it to a bone whose original muscle has been paralyzed, due to a nerve injury: the ‘tendon transfer’ surgery can restore movement to a previously paralyzed part
