Laura Kendall on Life with a Prosthesis and Learning to Accept Herself

  📍 I'm Beth Huddleston, host of the World Circle. Today's guest is Laura Kendall. Laura is the author of a book titled "My Prosthetic Life," a memoir about her experiences growing up with a prosthetic arm due to a birth defect caused by her mother taking a medication called thalidomide during her pregnancy.

In our interview, Laura discusses all the ways in which living with a difference affected her life and how she eventually learned to accept and love herself as she is. Laura, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. The book you wrote, which is called "My Prosthetic Life," in that book, you talk about the fact that you were born with an underdeveloped left arm. You were missing part of your arm as well as your hand and your wrist. I want to focus on your childhood and the repercussions of having that missing part of your arm. The hardest part was being stared at, feeling like I was always stared at, whether it would be adults or children.

And then the constant questions. What happened to your arm? Why are you different? And my earliest memories are of me hiding my arm behind my back so I wouldn't have to deal with any of that. What about trying to do things that other kids could do physically? What was that like? That was pretty easy for me because I got my first prosthetic device when I was eight and a half months old so that I could walk.

I didn't have any balance and I couldn't really crawl. So my parents took me to a place called Robin Aids and they built my first manual prosthesis. And so with them and their doctor, they were really diligent about teaching me how to use it from the beginning. I was fitted with it every morning and I wore it all day long.

I was forced to do things with it instead of learning to do things without it and then trying to introduce it into my life. So it's always been a part of me from the beginning. I think a lot of people don't necessarily know all that goes along with having a prosthesis. And as you get older, you need to get new ones.

You have to get fittings. What are all of the practical issues of having a prosthesis? They're not very comfortable until you get used to them. And even then, they're uncomfortable when it's hot outside. My particular prosthesis was worn with a harness that connected to the actual prosthesis and went around my back, over my shoulder, and around my arm and reattached in the middle of my shoulder.

And that would allow me to move my shoulders back and forth for the hook to open and close. And with that nylon harness around my back and under my arm, first of all, it caused cysts under my arm from all the pressure and the friction. And then, every time I got a new one, there would be a size difference.

There would be a weight difference. And just getting used to, even if it looked pretty much the same, there were always obstacles and breaking in periods where it wasn't very fun. It wasn't very comfortable. It's like getting new glasses. You always have to get used to the new prescription so that you're not tripping over yourself.

It's the same thing. How did the prosthetics change over the years? You would think with technological developments, medical developments that they would get better. Was that the case with you? It wasn't the case with me. And it was a combination of two things. One, I always wanted the hook. Let me back up, when I was little, I couldn't wait to have a hand, so that I would look like everybody else.

But I was told I couldn't have one until I got finished growing because of the expense of it. My arms pretty well stayed the same up until that point. And when I was in junior high school, I finally was able to get a latex glove with a hand on it, but it was totally manual. They didn't have hands that moved yet, and so it was just cosmetic and I hated it. After my parents bought it for me and years of begging, I wore it probably one or two times and mostly just as a joke because I just I thought it was ridiculous because it was totally not functional, and they call me a wearer because I use my arms until they're just worn out.

And so then fast forward to an adult when they started coming out with myoelectric arms They had a hand where the index finger and the thumb would move together, but none of the hand would move. So I couldn't hold my hair in a ponytail with it. Again, it just wasn't functional. And then the Vietnam War had ended, and they started focusing most of the efforts, financially and otherwise, to legs.

Because more people needed prosthetic legs, and it was more important for people to walk around, and there weren't very many of us that needed upper extremity prosthetics. Now, it's back on board. Now that we have had soldiers coming back without limbs, upper extremities, they have put more money into them, but they're still not perfect.

They're still, for example, I still choose to wear a hook because the hand, like I said, never worked for me. And I did eventually get one where all the fingers moved, but I still, I couldn't type with it. And I was carving a chicken in the kitchen and I cut one of the fingers off. So it just wasn't very kitchen friendly either.

And anyway, I still have the myoelectric hook, which that means I don't have to have the nylon harness and it has electrodes inside and when I move my arm inside it tells it to open and close it so it's not nerve specific it doesn't listen to my nerves it listens to my muscle in my arm so if you open your hand and close it the muscle that you can feel in your arm when that happens is what it feels inside my prosthesis and that's what makes my hook open and close.

Now I still have to plug it in at night or it won't work. It has a battery in it. That's another challenge because I could be in the middle of doing something important and it just dies. So I think it could still be modified better. I don't know if maybe I can be a part of that too, because I would love it if there was a stylus on the end of my hook too, so I could have an Apple watch. Right now it won't work. Yeah. So many little things that yeah, another person wouldn't think about. What was your understanding as a child as to why you were born missing part of your arm? I just always accepted. That's the way it was. And I think that's what I tell my granddaughter now is Everybody's born different and this is something that just happened. I don't want to bring God into it, but for a while people would say that's how God made you and so that was also an explanation for it.

But it's something that I wasn't allowed to really dwell on. If I said I can't, my parents would say, Yes, you can, and you will. It was never an excuse, and it was never necessarily a negative concept. It was just the way it is, and you will do what you have to do, and you will be productive in this society, and you're going to do everything that other kids do.

So I did. That was both of your parents attitude toward it? Yes, and when I first got it, of course there's a break-in period and my parents went to the prosthetist and said, she's beating up the furniture with it. What do we do? And he said spank her so that's how I got broken into.

Now what is your understanding of what caused the issue with your arm when you were born? My mother said she always believed that it was caused by a pill that she took for morning sickness, for nausea. And back then, nobody told her what that pill was. And my sister, I did have a sister, she was 17 months younger than me, and she was also born with defects, but hers were all internal.

And first, the doctor told my mother, maybe you shouldn't have children because your children are being born handicapped. And so they gave her a tubal ligation, and then later, I wish my mother was alive now so I could ask her the time frame, but then later it was discovered that obviously the things that were wrong with both of us were caused by the pill that she took.

Now, it wasn't believed it was thalidomide because it was never legal in this country, but there was a secret clinical trial done. And that's as much as I can say about that right now.  So I believe that I am a thalidomide survivor. And even though this drug was actually never FDA approved in this country.

How did having this disability affect decisions you made? How did it affect you emotionally as you grew up? That is a good question, a very good question. I believe that what was on the outside wasn't necessarily what I felt like on the inside. Everybody, my friends at school, family, everybody saw me as a strong little girl who could do anything.

Everybody was proud that I could play the organ and I could do everything that other little kids could do. But for me inside, I always felt like I was missing something. I always felt like there was an empty void. And then I had periods of feeling sorry for myself, poor me, why was I the one born like this?

How come I can't clap my hands like the other kids? How come I can't wear two gloves? It was stuff like that bothered me. And so I spent a lot of time in my bedroom, by myself, listening to music. And when I got into those depressed times, later... I found a drug that would make me feel completely better, which obviously it didn't.

It just felt like it did. And so I had some addiction issues because of it. And other than that, I always felt like a normal kid or young lady because I didn't really think about it all that much. During the day, if somebody said something, I go, Oh, yeah, I am different. But most of the time, I felt just like everybody else.

Except for these depressed times. And my parents, my family, they all cried when I was born because they thought, Oh, is she ever going to have a normal life? Is she ever going to get married and have children? What's life going to be like for her? So I got married four times and had a child and proved them all wrong.

Twice to the same man I read in your book. Yes, and we had our daughter, which is why we married twice. We wanted to make it work for our daughter. It just wasn't gonna happen. And now I've been with my husband now for 30 years. So I finally found the one. It took a lot of crawling through stuff to get there, but it was worth it.

You mentioned that you played the organ, that you did things like other kids did. In your adulthood now, you've learned to play the guitar with your prosthesis. You've typed, you are a really excellent typist. What has that been like to do those things? And what are some other things that you've done that would surprise people?

Anything. The only thing that I really can't do is, thank goodness that nobody has them anymore, but I really had trouble putting sheets on a waterbed because I couldn't hold the water up and do it. But mostly I've been able to do, it takes time to learn. In fact, I'm still struggling with guitar. I can do chords, but my ultimate goal is to strum and to pick a little.

Obviously I can't feel with my hook and so I have to look at where I am on the strings, but I'm determined. If I got this far with it and my guitar instructor keeps, I put it aside a little bit for the book because I had signings and stuff to do with this. And so I've taken a hiatus with the guitar, but I'm going back because I am determined to get this thing right.

Do you think that your parents always saying. You can do it. You're going to do it. You're going to do everything. Do you think that was drilled in your head so much that you've just always gone for things? Yes. And I think that's the one thing...everybody has imperfect parents. That is the one thing I believe they did absolutely because I could have just fallen into, Oh, you're different. You don't have to, and I wouldn't have strived as hard as I have my whole life to do any task. Even tying my shoes. You mentioned in your book that you have had these two really great friends for decades now. I think a lot of people don't necessarily have that in their lifetime.

And so I wanted to ask you, what do you think has kept you guys best friends for all these years? Unlike husbands, I had a really good picker when it came to friends. My girlfriend, Claudia, we have been friends since we were six and she's an amazing person. She had three brothers and a sister. I had no siblings.

And so for me, she was always kind of m ore like a sister. She helped me do things. She was the one that held my hook when we had to get in a circle and hold hands with people, just so I wouldn't be uncomfortable. Now, don't get me wrong, we fought like sisters too, but I think that's what made us so close.

We have probably more trust in each other than any friend could ever have. Unfortunately, she moved to Wisconsin. Last time I saw her was at my first book signing. But she did come out for that to support me and stuff. And so we're still very close, even though we don't get to connect much anymore. And then my other friend, Lori, we bonded because we were freshmen in high school.

And in one class, we found out our names were alike. Our birthdays are a day apart. And we just connected. I don't know. It's just sometimes you just connect with somebody and you just really don't know why but you just do and we've been like that forever. We had one fight. We've been friends all this time.

And I was trying to make her laugh by putting a M& M in her ear. She was really sick and I wanted her to smile so bad and she said, don't put that in my ear, Laura, and I did. And she got really mad at me. That's our only fight. And we've just, we still, I just saw her a few days ago. She lives locally, so I get to visit with her way more than Claudia.

So she's my second best friend. That's so wonderful. I love to hear that. It's also fortunate that I didn't have to move around in my childhood. Same house from first grade through high school until I got married. And so that helped too. My friends are from long ago because we're all still here. Yeah, that's true.

That's a good point. That helps. I want to step back quickly to the idea you mentioned in your book that taking off your prosthetic felt worse than being naked in front of people. It just felt so emotionally painful. Can you try to put that into words? What that might feel like? Because everybody else is looking at you, you mentioned, and they're thinking, she seems like everybody else.

She can do stuff that everybody else can do. So what is it? What was it in your mind that made that feel so painful, the idea of being without it? I wish I knew. I wish I could explain it. I think since I had it before I knew anybody but my mother and father, I just felt it was such a part of me that if it wasn't there, I didn't feel whole or something.

I don't know really what it was. What I found out later, when I did get comfortable, now when we go to the beach or we go anywhere where I don't have it on, I realize that people don't even look because they don't see all this metal and an odd thing that's attached to my arm. They don't even notice it because there's just flesh.

If I had known that all those years, I probably wouldn't have felt so self conscious. It's funny what you don't know when you're a kid and it's taken, shoot, I'm 65. It's taken me a whole lifetime to learn some stuff. I guess it does for everybody, depending on what they have to learn, but I don't know, if I had to go back, I wish I could have learned that a little sooner.

Yeah. That's what I was going to ask is if you could talk to your younger self based on what you've learned now and what you've come to accept about yourself, what would you want to say to her? Let it go. Let it go. You're different. You've accepted it. Who cares what anybody else thinks? Be you. You'd mentioned in the interview and in your book that you were reminded of it, though, by other people coming up to you saying things.

Was that just a pretty frequent happening as you grew up that people would actually say things about it? Oh, yeah, and it still happens. It still happens. It's just I've learned that it's going to happen. And it's funny that it took me so long to accept the fact that it's not going away. And even if I answered people my whole life in a nice way, I still had that ick feeling.

And now I don't get that feeling anymore. I've totally accepted the fact that you're going to have to answer this question your whole life. I think it hit me when my daughter was born. Because when her friends started asking about it. I thought, oh my gosh, it's never going to end. Now I have to go through generations.

The next generation's asking me about it. So I think that's when it finally hit me. It's not going to go away. So just deal with it. Yeah, it's some sort of desensitization. It just happens so often that you're like, okay, I give up. I accept. Exactly. So I want to also ask you what was it like writing your book?

What was that experience like? It was really healing, and it was surprising because I didn't know I was going to write a book. And I've always enjoyed writing, and I always got A's in English. I've taken, even in business college, I think I took more English than I needed for credit because I just loved it.

And I would journal once in a while, but it wasn't a habit. And then I found that challenge on Facebook, write 500 words a day for 30 days and see what happens. And, I was like, that was so much fun. So even after that, I bought a book with writing prompts in it so that I would just keep it up because it was just so fun to me.

And then when family and my husband, when I'd share what I had written to certain people, they would say, you can write. Why don't you put this stuff in a book? And I thought, who's going to read it? And then I took it a little further in my head and thought, a memoir is supposed to be a specific part of your story, not an autobiography.

And I thought, maybe it would help somebody else who feels different, no matter what their difference is. Maybe they're missing a toe. I knew a girl with key shaped pupils, eyes. It's really strange to look at her, to talk to her and stuff. But I thought, everybody has some kind of difference that they may be self conscious about.

Even people who you think look just perfect. There's something about themselves that they would change. And so I thought, putting this together as a memoir might help somebody else. But really, somebody asked me, did it help you? And I said, yes. And they said, there's your one person. I'm hoping that I'm not the only person it helps and I have had a couple of people, one person at my book signing that I didn't know came up and said, I have to share my story.

And she shared this story that was very traumatizing for her. And she told me that my book helped her. And so there's my 1 person. What would you say if you had to put a message out there for people who may be experiencing a difference? They feel they have a difference, mental, physical. What kind of a message would you want to put out there?

The one thing that finally came to me is nobody has to do this alone. There's always somebody else struggling with a difference. There's always somebody who can maybe get one thing out of another story and they don't feel alone.  I've heard somebody say you can stay in your poop until it gets stinky enough where you have to jump out.

And sometimes it helps to listen to somebody else's story and then yours doesn't look so bad. It's a gratitude check for sure. I also noticed in your book that you mentioned at one point that you've always been searching for your purpose and you said you're still looking for your purpose. I think a lot of people feel that way.

A lot of people go years and years and they feel that they have a sense of purpose, but they don't know what it is. What are your thoughts on the current status of your search for a sense of purpose? There's two. One is my best friend that we talked about in the beginning that I've known since I was six, Claudia.

She has a disabled son. And I asked her, do you think we were friends all these years because it might have helped you with a challenging child? And she said, wow, I never even thought of that. So maybe that's part of what my purpose was. Something you don't find out until much later. And the other thing is, I have learned through all of this that having felt so bad about myself for so long, I finally learned that doing things for other people Is what makes you feel so much better about yourself.

I have volunteered with the SPCA to help with the animals. And then writing the book hopefully will help somebody else. And so I'm giving time to people and animals. Maybe that's part of my purpose. Yeah, I think it's just one of those lifelong searches for a lot of people and depends on where they're at and what they see as purpose in that moment, but it can be all around us.

And I believe, I hope that we are all put here to learn something. If so I've learned it, but I'm not ready to go yet. So I'm sure there's other stuff that I have to learn. Yeah, exactly.

All right. Do you have any final thoughts? I feel like a lot of my life I've been misunderstood. And I hope this book helps people understand how somebody feels  when they're not like you or when they have challenging lives. And I want people to know that it's possible. But I think it's only possible when you start loving yourself first.

My ex husband had said, You're never going to love anybody else until you love yourself. And I got so mad at him. But it's true. And I think that's why my husband now and I work so well. I think we hear that you have to love yourself first a lot. And I think sometimes when people are really, like you said, you got frustrated. When people are in the thick of it, and they're feeling really bad, they're like, what does that mean? How does that happen? That sounds like a pie in the sky kind of idea. So what do you think in terms of the actual process where you have gotten to that point? What do you think that was? How did that happen? I don't know, but I think it's really different for everyone.

In my case, they say rock bottom. I don't believe in that. I just believe you have to go through so much before you finally surrender to the fact that you're either going to be miserable for the rest of your life, or you're going to accept it and move on. And for me, I'm an only child, and everything I've ever tried to let go of had claw marks in it.

It's just my personality. And so learning to let things go is probably where my growth started, where my fear of change ended. I always had this, I wanted things to stay the same when they were going well because I really didn't want to feel bad anymore. I think once I let it go and started loving myself and not caring what other people thought, it paved the way to ultimate happiness for me. I don't think I was ever going to be happy until all those things happened. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you for being here. I really appreciate it. Thank you.