Do you really need your pinky finger?

     "Man from the South" is a story that follows a bet between an older South American man and a young navel cadet. The bet was that if the young cadet could light his lighter 10 times in a row, the older man would give him a Cadillac. But, if not he would have to cut off his little finger on his left hand. At first the cadet was unsure of this bet, but eventually agreed because he didn't have any use for his little finger. As the story goes on, the tension builds about who would lose this very risky bet but right before light number 10 a women appears and stops the bet. This women is the older man's wife and is very upset with him and apologized to the cadet. She explains that this has happened many times and she has had to make up for his mistakes. She shows her hand which has only one finger and a thumb.
     If the wife never saw this bet and the young cadet would have lost, multiple aspects of his life would have been affected. First, the fact that one of his main occupations is being a cadet which would involve being able to handle all of his gear and firearms. With a missing little finger, the cadet would experience decreased hand mobility and decreased overall hand strength. This would negatively affect how he held a firearm and the control that he had over this equipment and even how he got dressed in his uniform daily. He also would have lost some ability and ease to perform leisure activities with the other cadets like going swimming or having a drink. A strategy that can be used to help this could include an adapted gun that had extra support and made it easy for the cadet to handle and also hand and finger strengthening exercises to help compensate for the missing digit.
     As for the wife, she is missing 3 of 5 digits on one of her hands and therefore is missing significant amounts of strength and ability to perform fine motor and daily tasks! We do not know much about her and her occupations but there are numerous ADL activities that she would need assistance doing. One strategy would be adapting some of her everyday things like her hairbrush, toothbrush and utensils to wrap around her wrist of have grips for her one finger and thumb to fit into so that the hand manipulation and strength would not be needed. Overall, this young cadet got very lucky that someone came and stopped this bet! Even though he did not know it at the time, his little finger is used in just about all hand and finger activities. He would have lost in hand manipulation skills, ROM and strength! This would have changed the way he had learned to live his life and he would have to learn all new strategies and techniques to adapt!