The old saying, “we’ll just be happy if the baby has ten fingers and ten toes” isn’t really about fingers and toes. It’s just a bland statement about wanting a healthy baby and caring about nothing else. But what does finger and toe count have to do with general health anyhow?
For example, take this six-year-old boy with 15 fingers and 16 toes. Granted, no one wants to be something other than normal, and buying shoes must be a bitch, but he’s undergoing an operation to remove the extra digits. It’s not a terminal state, this polydactyly (yep, that’s a word).
