What is the right time to have surgery for a floating thumb?

We have been advising floating thumb babies to have the surgery as early as possible, but inevitably some babies will be delayed for various reasons and miss the age we recommend for the surgery, and the children are more or less affected by this, and every time we talk to them, we are touched by their tender words. “My brother’s hands look good, I want to be like my brother’s hands”, were the words of a four-year-old floating bunion baby. She is the younger sister and has an older brother above her, who also came with her parents this time. The brother is seven years old and the siblings are very affectionate. Unlike his sister, he has a pair of fleshy and cute little hands. The parents had taken the baby to several hospitals before, trying to save the baby’s thumbs, but because their pitti were too small, most of the hospitals suggested a demonstrative thumb bunionization, which means removing the thumb and moving the index finger to the thumb position to be used as a thumb. Finally, one hospital said that they could do metatarsal reconstruction for the child, taking bone from the foot to reconstruct the first metacarpal bone and the first carpometacarpal joint, in order to save the child’s thumb, but they could not bear to let the child do it for fear that the operation on the foot would affect the child’s sports in the future. Metatarsal reconstruction can indeed achieve the goal of preserving the five fingers, but the impact of the surgery on the foot also makes some parents have concerns. Many parents think that both the hands and feet are important, and that it would be too costly to take their child to have the foot reconstructed. Nowadays, we mainly use half-metacarpal bone graft reconstruction technique to treat floating bunion. We take part of the bone from the second metacarpal of the affected hand to rebuild the first metacarpal, which does not affect the foot, and the child only needs to pay attention to his/her hands after the surgery, which makes the nursing care relatively simple and the impact of the surgery is minimized. Semi-metacarpal bone graft reconstruction technique is divided into two phases, the first phase to move the bone, the second phase to establish the function, after the two phases of the operation you can start to carry out functional exercises, the thumb can slowly do some things, the appearance and function will be significantly improved.