The doctors who performed the surgery on Zion said that this type of surgery had never been done on a child before and had been performed first time on an adult in 2011. The boy lost his hands and feet as a toddler when he contracted sepsis. Fisher, a 36-year-old resident of Jackson, MI, became the nation’s second hand transplant recipient following a 13-hour procedure on February 16-17.
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A team of 40 medical experts at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in the United States have performed the first-ever double hand transplant on a child after a marathon 11-hour operation.
The surgical team – divided into four separate operating teams, two for each donor limb and two for the recipient – attached the hands and forearms from the donor by connecting bone, blood vessels, nerves, muscles, tendons and skin.
Dr Scott Levin, the transplant programme director at CHOP, praised the family of the deceased child whose hands were used for the operation. The boy, who showed up at the news conference on Tuesday with bandaged, but visible, hands, woke up smiling, Levin shares. When he was 2 years old, doctors amputated his extremities after an infection caused him to develop gangrene. Hospital officials in Philadelphia believe Zion is the youngest person to undergo a double-hand transplant, which requires a lifetime of immune-suppressing drugs to ensure the body doesn’t reject the new limbs.
For his feet, Zion has been fitted with artificial limbs that Zion could walk, run and jump before his double hand transplant.
8 year old Zion Harvey’s double hand transplant has, so far, been a complete success.
There have only been 25 hand transplants done in the world, and they’ve all been done on adults.
Since the amputations, Zion has received prosthetic legs and learned how to eat, write and play video games. Earlier this month, after doctors performed a complex, groundbreaking procedure, Zion moved one step closer to making his dream a reality, reports CBS News correspondent Anna Werner. Now, physicians are expecting that he’ll become capable of achieving more milestones, together with his aims of playing on the monkey bars and throwing a football. “I don’t know what a child’s hand looks like”, said Zion Harvey. That infection also led to a kidney transplant, and that procedure made the boy a candidate for transplant, doctors said, since he was already taking anti-rejection medication.
The clinical team expects Zion to spend several more weeks in CHOP’s rehabilitation unit, and then to be discharged to his home in Baltimore, Md.
The hand donor’s family chose to remain anonymous.
Zion’s mother, Patti Ray, said she thought hard about whether her son should have the surgery.
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“I really wanted them to feel appreciated too and not left out”, he said.
