Everything’s A-OK! Here Comes Honey Boo Boo star Anna “Chickadee” Cardwell spoke to Us Weekly exclusively about her daughter Kaitlyn Cardwell, who recently underwent surgery at a children’s hospital in Birmingham, Alabama, to remove the extra thumb she was born with.
“The doctor told me that she did very, very well,” the 22-year-old reality star, who is the eldest daughter of Mama June Shannon, told Us of her 4-year-old daughter, who was put under anesthesia for the surgery.
According to Anna, Kaitlyn was initially reluctant about saying goodbye to her additional thumb. “[At first] she was like, ‘No, Mommy, I’m going to miss my little finger,'” Anna explained. “I said, ‘When you get older, people might pick on you. You don’t know that.’ She was like, ‘Well then, Ma, you can get on to them and go back and pick at them.'”
Kaitlyn then had a change of heart and grew excited for her surgery. Now she adorably believes that her thumb was magically removed and that she has Frozen superpowers as a result. “We kept telling her that it was magic, that the doctor would do magic … they would put her to sleep, and then that it was going to be magically gone, and she got all excited about it,” Anna explained. “And now she thinks somehow, now that it’s healing [at] home, she thinks she’s gonna have Frozen powers.”
Anna, who is also mom of 11-month-old daughter Kylee with husband Michael Cardwell, told Us that not everyone in her family was on board for Kaitlyn to get her finger surgically removed.
“All my mama was worried about was would [Kaitlyn] have mobility in her thumb after the surgery,” the TLC alum explained. “That’s why she didn’t want [Kaitlyn] to get it done, and same for my sisters. … They got upset whenever I told them. I said, ‘I really hope Kylee don’t have it because I don’t want to go through it again.’ My sister Jessica got kind of really upset about that. And then [Kylee] ended up not having it.”
Kaitlyn’s abnormality was often discussed on Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, which was canceled in October 2014. In a September 2012 episode of the show, Alana “Honey Boo Boo” Thompson joked about her niece’s extra finger, saying, “I wish I had an extra finger [so] then I could grab more cheese balls!”
Kaitlyn had her cast removed on Monday, November 14, less than a month after her October 18 surgery.
