I think this happened after the last concussion, but I’m not sure.\u00a0\u00a0 Not much more than five years, certainly not ten,\u00a0 I think; I haven’t always had a third invisible hand and partial arm hanging on the wrong side of my body.\u00a0 It started while I was distracted.\u00a0\u00a0 I gradually I became aware that one hand was uncomfortable (not painful, just “tight”–with a prickly sensation over the palm, as if holding something a little rough-textured a little too long.)\u00a0 I’d been absorbed in what I was doing, and now the hand near my right thigh was calling attention to itself.\u00a0 I glanced down…at nothing.\u00a0 No hand there.\u00a0\u00a0 Looked again: both hands were in plain view, sort of in front of me.\u00a0 (I don’t remember what I was doing the first time the third hand announced itself. ) The invisible hand that had intruded on my awareness felt like my hand–and very specifically my left hand–but why was I feeling it at all?<\/p>\n
I knew about the phantom limbs that amputations cause…the limb your brain is used to monitoring isn’t there, but the software and hardware to monitor it still is in your brain…so your brain says “It’s there, and by the way it’s hurting.”\u00a0 I had read Oliver Sacks’ account of his own experience after a very bad leg injury and surgery, where his leg didn’t feel like his–another common problem, this time with an attached but damaged body part.\u00a0 As a neurologist he’d seen a lot of patients with similar experiences.\u00a0 But an extra hand showing up in old age?\u00a0 What caused that?\u00a0 My real hands were there, and hadn’t suffered amputation or serious injury.\u00a0 The thought that maybe my brain had suffered serious injury…that the various concussions had caused it…did not occur at once, because my conscious mind recoiled from that very scary thought before I could think it.\u00a0 I’ve thought it since, of course, since the phenomenon has recurred again and again: I’ll suddenly notice that my left hand is holding something textured (up to prickly),\u00a0 glance down at my leg, and check that the actual left hand is really still there.<\/p>\n
It has a name: supernumerary extracorporeal phantom limb, often shortened to just “supernumerary phantom limb” or SPL.\u00a0\u00a0 Supernumerary because it’s a true extra–nothing’s missing.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s the phantom limb not resulting from amputation.\u00a0 What does it result from?\u00a0 In some cases, it results from a stroke (large or small) or a leaky aneurysm, or a brain tumor.\u00a0 Traumatic brain injury can result in a supernumerary extracorporeal phantom limb, though it usually doesn’t.\u00a0 Spinal cord injury (complete or incomplete) can cause it.\u00a0 Severe injury to a limb, short of amputation, can cause it.\u00a0\u00a0 Apparently (if I understand the papers I’ve read about it) anything the disrupts the normal signaling cycle we use to determine where our body parts are…signals from tactile receptors going to the brain, and engaging the brain’s own concept of what “this-body” is, how it exists in space, and sending signals back directing movement and visual input…can result in the feeling that a limb is somewhere other than it “should” be, and thus experienced as an extra.\u00a0 Though not everyone who has a TBI has been asked, “Hey, do you ever feel an extra hand or foot or nose?”\u00a0 In other cases, it’s not known because the person with it hasn’t had one of the really modern brain-scans that can detect various anomalies.\u00a0 Or because, like me, they just don’t tell a doctor of the type who might start digging to find out, or fear being labeled mentally ill and delusional.<\/p>\n
Some people are very upset by the apparent presence of an invisible body part: some are frightened, some angry, some just don’t want it.\u00a0 Treatment is generally intended not to fix it–make the sensation go away–but to make the patient more tolerant of having it.\u00a0 There are some approaches (sort of physical therapy based) that have, sometimes, ended with the phantom vanishing.\u00a0\u00a0 Mine doesn’t really bother me.\u00a0\u00a0 Once I knew the range of sensations associated with it (a tingling like part of the body going numb from pressure on a nerve–as when a leg or foot has “gone to sleep” and is coming back to use) I could often identify its appearance without visually checking for it.\u00a0 It doesn’t seem to be associated with any particular functional problem (clumsiness, balance difficulties, etc)\u00a0 so it’s more like a curiosity on a display shelf.\u00a0 Interesting, maybe a bit mysterious, but ultimately not a big deal at all.\u00a0 Briefly, early on, I sortakinda hoped it would be useful, as in some science fiction or fantasy stories, something that could expand my ability to carry things, or catch things slipping off a stack of stuff I was already carrying.\u00a0 It’s not.\u00a0 It exists (mentally) where it is.\u00a0\u00a0 Recently, I’ve expended (for the heck of it) effort in trying to move its fingers a little…or seem to…and maybe I have.\u00a0 But what the fingers are holding is as non-existent as the hand itself, so it makes no difference.\u00a0\u00a0 And since I was *trying* to feel that difference, it brings into question whether imagination, rather than actual neural feedback of some sort, was involved.\u00a0 I have, after all, a lively, inventive, and active imagination (not a plot-making one, now, but thinking non-plot things up is still going on.)\u00a0 Not worth pursuing, I decided.<\/p>\n
It is tempting to put the origin of my third-hand experience at one of the two traumatic injuries just over four years ago–either the one in the fall of 2017, when the bike handlebar punched me in the neck, or the buck-off in February of 2018 that delivered the concussion that definitely did cause (it still causing me) problems.\u00a0 But if “accumulation” of small injuries could lead to it, then I’d have to start much earlier, with the serious illnesses of childhood, the most serious of which was the encephalitis that caused partial deafness and residual weakness on the left side.\u00a0 The deafness ended after a few years, but the left-sided weakness was obvious\u00a0 for decades. By HS and early college, I had a spinal curvature from unequal muscle development; my mother adjusted the clothes she made me to fit a lopsided body.\u00a0 I’ve had some neurological “things” going on for a long time.<\/p>\n
So there it is.\u00a0 A supernumerary left hand sometimes hovers around my upper right thigh, and accomplishes nothing but mildly intriguing me.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I think this happened after the last concussion, but I’m not sure.\u00a0\u00a0 Not much more than five years, certainly not ten,\u00a0 I think; I haven’t always had a third invisible hand and partial arm hanging on the wrong side of my body.\u00a0 It started while I was distracted.\u00a0\u00a0 I gradually I became aware that one Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[53,17],"class_list":["post-1230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","tag-it","tag-life-beyond-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1230"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1230"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1232,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1230\/revisions\/1232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}