Boy, 5, born without a left hand gets new one at Annapolis Home Depot
Bradley Goloski bent his left elbow. The 5-year-old stared, mouth agape, as the fingers on his blue prosthetic hand clenched into a fist.
His parents stood wordless nearby, tears in their eyes.
“Cool or what?” maker John “Jack” Longo asked Bradley.
“Yeah,” said the boy in the monster truck T-shirt. He was distracted by the prosthetic hand and the adoring crowd of family and sales associates at the North Annapolis Home Depot on Friday.
The prosthesis is one of about 120 that Longo, a hardware sales associate, has fabricated and donated to children and adults with missing hands and limbs over the past year and a half.
The Home Depot started stocking Dremel 3-D printers about 21⁄ years ago. Dremel sends the store spools of plastic filament to be used for in-store demonstrations — mainly to make chess pieces, dinosaurs, frogs and other children’s toys.
“If we weren’t running this machine, [people] wouldn’t know what it was,” Longo said. “They’d think it’s a microwave oven. By keeping it building something, they realize it is a 3-D printer.”
When the Crownsville man heard about e-NABLE, an online community that connects volunteers with 3-Dprinters to people who need prostheses, he was fascinated.
He got permission from Dremel and the Home Depot store manager, downloaded the technology required and sent a test prosthesis to e-NABLE for the organization to review for quality.
Saad Alam, head of product development at Dremel, said the company’s goal is “to inspire people of all ages and backgrounds to create.”
“We are so touched to hear Bradley’s story and honored that one of our 3-D printers has helped make an immeasurable difference in his life,” Alam said in a statement. “Learning how our products are being used to impact others is what sparks us to keep innovating and pushes us as a company.”
A representative of e-NABLE could not be reached for comment.
The printed prostheses drew customer enthusiasm — and sales. Customers bought 43 of the printers in six months, Longo said.
“Sales jumped,” he said. “It does build stuff other than toys. It’ll build literally anything you program into it.”
Most of the donations were sent off to e-NABLE for distribution, so Longo and his Home Depot colleagues didn’t get to see the reactions of the recipients.
Watching Bradley try on the arm was special, said the store manager, Laura Gibson.
“To know it came from an item I carry in the building means so much,” she said.
Paula Franks and her husband, Peter, friends of Bradley’s grandparents, shop at the store on Defense Highway so much that they joke that they basically live there.
The Annapolis couple had never never met Bradley, but they had seen his grandparents’ pictures of him. The boy had experienced amniotic band syndrome, a prenatal condition in which a part or parts of the fetus are entrapped by fibrous amniotic bands. As a result, he was born without a left hand.
When they learned about Longo’s project, they knew they had to connect the two.
Bradley and his 3-year-old sister, Emma, trailed by parents and other eager onlookers, bounded down the hardware aisle Friday afternoon as if the Home Depot were Disney World.
He had come in two weeks earlier to be Bradley Goloski, 5, of Queen Anne’s County operates his new prosthetic hand Friday at the North Annapolis Home Depot, while his father, Tommy Goloski, watches. fitted for the prosthesis.
The color was non-negotiable: It needed to match Thomas the Tank Engine. (A vivid metallic-looking blue — it did.)
“We tried to steer him to Orioles colors, but he wanted the blue,” Paula Franks said.
Longo took the prosthesis from the box and fitted it to Bradley’s arm. He tightened the Velcro straps around Bradley’s left biceps.
As family and store employees watched with phone cameras trained on him, Bradley tested the new hand. He picked up a cup, a few Matchbox toy cars and his sister’s pink Croc sandal.
His parents, Tommy and Cory Goloski, gazed at their son and thought of the everyday activities the new hand would make easier for him: riding a bike, swinging on a swing, lining up the tracks for his train set.
Longo gave the Queen Anne’s County family instructions for the prosthesis, a few extra accessories and a chip with the 3D specifications on it, which they can use to print another one.
The design can be printed bigger, so they can make new ones as Bradley grows up.
Tom Goloski, Bradley and Emma’s grandfather, choked up as he was introduced to Longo. The 66-year-old Annapolis man bypassed a handshake to give him a hug.
“I can’t thank you enough,” he said.