Marin fundraisers mobilize for teen who needs prosthetic arm

Ayaan Shah enjoys running track — a sport that doesn’t require two fully operational arms and hands. At the same time, he says, it would be great if he could also do pushups or lift weights and build up his arm strength.

“I’ve only been working out the lower half of my body,” said Ayaan, 13, a seventh-grader at Venetia Valley School in San Rafael. “The top of my body is like a stick.”

Born with a left arm that stops at his elbow, Ayaan was first fitted with a prosthetic lower arm and hand at age 2, he said. Five years later, he received an updated version that was bigger and sized for an elementary school student.

But now that version is too small and too short for a teenage body, and the hand is stuck together in one piece, immovable. Ayaan continues to wear it because the cost of a new one would be $76,000, including $14,000 in out-of-pocket expenses.

“My mom’s been crying,” Ayaan said. “She doesn’t want me to use the same arm when I get to high school.”

Two of Ayaan’s teachers have stepped in to help. About a week ago, Mike Dumbra and Tiffany Avalos started an online fundraiser.

Dumbra, the teen’s science teacher, said he’s known Ayaan for about a year and has been monitoring the device and talking to Ayaan about it.

“He’s always been very open in talking about it,” Dumbra said.

Over the past few months, Dumbra said he noticed the device was becoming “dirtier and smaller compared to his size.”

“I asked Ayaan, ‘What’s the plan with your new arm?'” Dumbra said.

The boy said he had started to get fitted for a new arm in November at the University of California-San Francisco Medical Center, but had to stop the process because of a lack of funds.

“I let that sink into my brain,” Dumbra said. “I realized that we could do a GoFundMe and raise the money so he could have an arm that fits his body size.”

The fundraiser has already collected nearly $11,000 but remains short of the $14,000 goal.

“He is a great student, a kind young man who works well with others,” Avalos wrote on the fundraising site. “Ayaan deserves to continue his school career and life without pain.”

Ayaan, who moved here from Fiji, hopes the new equipment will enable him to interlace the fingers of his hands. He also would love to be able to alternatively open and close his palms, as if he were doing a magic trick where one hand holds the penny and the other is empty.

“It’s like a dream come true,” Ayaan said of the possibility of a new, right-sized arm and hand.

The fundraising page is at gofundme.com/f/7th-grader-ayaan-needs-a-new-arm.