Maryland boy is world’s 1st child with double hand transplant

Eight-year-old Zion Harvey can now sign the childhood song that begins with “I have two hands, the left and the right …” For six years, he couldn’t because Zion lost his two hands to an infection when he was two. An 11-hour surgery in early July made him the world’s first child with a double hand transplant.

To attach the new and old bones of Zion’s hands, the 40-member team from The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia used screws and steel plates, Fox reports. The surgeons first reconnected the patient’s blood vessels and when blood began to flow, they repaired and rejoined one-by-one the tendons and muscles, reports CBS.

Dr L. Scott Levin, head of the hospital’s transplant programme, lauded Zion from whom he did not hear a single whimper, hear a cry or complain. The boy, who showed up at the news conference on Tuesday with bandaged, but visible, hands, woke up smiling, Levin shares. Zion says the new limbs are “weird at first, but then good.”

Zion, from Owings Mills, suffered from sepsis when he was two, which resulted to multiple organ failure and led to amputation of the child’s feet and hands. At four, he underwent kidney transplant surgery with the organ coming from his mother, Pattie Ray. He became a good candidate for hand transplant because with his kidney transplant, Zion has been taking anti-rejection medication that he has to take for a lifetime.

For his feet, Zion has been fitted with artificial limbs that Zion could walk, run and jump before his double hand transplant. He could even write, eat and play video games using his forearms, but with his new hands, doctors say he could even throw a football and use the monkey bars.

But before he could do that, Zion would need to undergo physical rehabilitation for several weeks in the hospital, said Levin who also is the chairman of the hospital’s Department of Orthopedic Surgery.

In the past few years, several adults in the US had double-hand or double-arm transplants, but Zion is the youngest person to undergo the procedure. In 2011, one such procedure was done on an adult in the same hospital which Levin said gave them “a foundation to adapt the intricate techniques and coordinated plans to perform this complex procedure on a child.”

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