When Zion Harvey was a two-year-old his mother had to make a heart breaking decision. Let doctors amputate her son’s hands and feet or lose him to a bacterial infection that was threatening to shut down his organs. Thankfully she chose the former.
Now, as an eight-year-old, Zion is the recipient of the world’s first double hand transplant performed on a child.
In a surgical milestone, Philadelphia doctors have transplanted donor hands and forearms on to Zion’s limbs during a groundbreaking 10 hour operation.
Zion told NBC News that the thing he is looking forward to most is being able to hold hands with his little sister.
“My favourite thing [will be to] wait for her to run into my hands as I pick her up and spin her around,” he said.
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Zion’s mother, Pattie Ray, was understandably emotional when she watched her son being wheeled out of the operating room at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia post-surgery.
“When I saw Zion’s hands for the first time after the operation I just felt like he was being reborn,” she said. “I see my son in the light I haven’t seen him in five years. It was like having a newborn.
It was a very joyous moment for me. I was happy for him.”
It took a team of 40 – lead by doctor Dr. L. Scott Levin to perform the world first procedure.
“The success of Penn’s first bilateral hand transplant on an adult, performed in 2011, gave us a foundation to adapt the intricate techniques and coordinated plans required to perform this type of complex procedure on a child,” Levin, chairman of the department of orthopedic surgery at Penn Medicine and director of the hand transplantation program at Children’s Hospital, said in a statement.
In a video filmed for the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia before the surgery Zion seemed optimistic – no matter what the outcome of the surgery.
“When I get these hands, I will be proud of what hands I get,” he says in the video. “And if it gets messed up, I don’t care because I have my family.”
Zion, who is from Baltimore, has been going through extensive hand therapy to work toward the day he can actually use his new hands.
In a touching moment on the video Dr. Levin talks about the first time he met Zion and asked him about his ambitions for his new hands.
“And he said, ‘I want to swing on monkey bars,” ” Dr. Levin says. “That’s sort of a milestone for a lot of kids and why shouldn’t he be like another child? Our hope is over time that indeed he’ll be able to do that.”
