Forked; branching like the prongs of a fork.
A friend and I were at a Yankees baseball game when we both noticed a man with a physical defect. His right arm ended just past his elbow with two small, malformed fingers forming a half-blossomed hand. The fingers were slightly webbed and there appeared to be no palm of this hand, which was visible just under the sleeve of the man’s t-shirt.
My friend asked me "Do you know what that is?" "What do you mean?" I asked. She said she couldn’t be 100% certain but the man’s hand looked like that of a classic "Thalidomide Baby," making this man one of only about ten or twelve-thousand people born between 1957 and 1962 with birth defects attributed the mother’s use of Thalidomide.
Thalidomide, developed by a German pharmaceuticals company, was a drug intended to relieve symptoms of morning sickness. Poor testing of the product, however, led to thousands of women giving birth to severely malformed babies. Many of those babies did not survive past childhood, but those who did would be about the age of the man we saw at Yankee Stadium that day. His arm was afflicted with phocomelia, while other Thalidomide babies were born with extra appendages, missing eyes, shortened legs, and other ailments.
My friend knows a lot about the condition, and she remarked how unusual it was to have seen one of the relatively small number of people on earth who made it to adulthood having been born a "Thalidomide Baby."
