MOST people seeing Shay Reid for the first time stop and stare. It happens so often that she’s no longer bothered, even as she admits that she doesn’t like it, as staring, she insists, is impolite.

Reid — who graduated from the University of the West Indies (UWI) with a degree in Psychology earlier this month — also despises being the subject of people’s pity, though she accepts that their natural inclination to compassion is driven by the fact that she has no lower arms.

“I really hate being treated special,” Reid tells the Jamaica Observer before demonstrating that she’s able to do what people with both arms can — write with a pen; use a cellphone; fetch money from her purse.

That she’s able to carry out these tasks amazes people, she says, particularly those who offer to help her pay her bus fare — an offer that she politely declines each time she boards a bus.

Reid’s sense of independence apparently has its genesis in how she was raised by her mother, Veronica Malcolm, grandfather Theodore Malcolm, and grandmother Pauline Simpson at their home in Little London, Westmoreland.

“When I was growing up I used to have chores, just like my cousins,” Reid says, explaining that she had to sweep the yard and do the dishes.

“It wasn’t difficult learning to do it,” says the 24-year-old. “It felt normal.” In fact, she adds, “I still do the dishes, if I’m told to [and] I can cook; I don’t like to, but I can.”

Why Reid was born without lower arms is still a mystery to her mother. According to Veronica Malcolm, doctors speculated that the abnormality was due to medication she was taking.

“But they couldn’t say what medication I was on,” Malcolm says. In fact, the only medication she recalls taking near that time was that prescribed after she was injured in a motor vehicle accident in 1978 — and that was before she became pregnant.

The accident, she reveals, left her with torn ligaments in her back and damaged fingers.

Doctors with whom the Sunday Observer spoke say that Reid’s condition could have resulted from a number of factors, among them medication that was being taken by her mother during her pregnancy.

“They were trying to probe it, but nothing came of it,” says Malcolm, who was working as a sales clerk at Negril Gardens Hotel when Shay was born on October 13, 1988.

Seeking help for her only child, Malcolm says she took Shay to orthopaedic surgeon Professor John Golding at Mona Rehab. “He wanted to keep her, but I refused, because I wouldn’t be able to care for her,” says Malcolm. “I thank God that I made that decision.”

Malcolm remembers that Shay started writing with her toes but switched to her arms sometime after entering basic school.

Her penmanship improved throughout her years at Little London Primary and then Manning’s School where she did well, passing seven Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) subjects and four in the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE).

Now that she has graduated with an upper second class honours degree, Reid, who describes herself as “bubbly”, “easy to talk to”, but “shy”, says she wants to practise clinical psychology abroad, preferably Canada.

“There’s not really much of a market for clinical psychology here,” she explains, adding that she hopes to secure a scholarship and is now doing the Graduate Record Examination — an admissions test for graduate schools in the USA and other English-speaking nations.

She is, though, willing to return to Jamaica and do whatever she can in the field. But hopes to first be certified by the American Psychological Association.

“I like studying the brain, and I’m interested in finding out what causes brain diseases and ways to treat them and how to live with them,” she says.

On Saturday, November 3, Malcolm — now a payables clerk at Sandals Montego Bay — sat in the audience and watched with pride as her daughter walked to the stage and collected her degree from UWI Campus Registrar Camille Bell Hutchinson.

“It was emotional,” Malcolm tells the Sunday Observer, admitting, too, that she cried. “Words cannot explain. I see her as a motivator, I knew she had the potential. Thanks to God, my father Theodore Malcolm, other family members and friends for their support.”