Sunday Read: Boy Receives Groundbreaking Double-Hand Transplant

An Owings Mills boy became the youngest recipient of a double hand transplant, authorities announced this week.

Eleven weeks ago, 8-year-old Zion Harvey underwent surgery to get new hands. The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where the operation was performed, announced the breakthrough at a news conference Tuesday.

“When I met Zion, I said, ‘Why do you want hands?’” L. Scott Levin, director of the hospital’s hand transplant program, said in a video detailing the story. “He said, ‘I want to swing on the monkey bars.’”

There are only 15 children’s hands that become available annually, Levin said. He noted the difficulty families and organizations face as the hands come when another child is lost. Levin said it was “remarkable” that Harvey was put on the waiting list in April and within three months, hands became available.

“When I get these hands,” Harvey said, “I will be proud of what hands I get.”

With his new hands, Harvey says he wants to be able to pick up his little sister, NBC reported.

“I wasn’t always like this,” Harvey said before the surgery, in the video of his story . “When I was two, I had to have my hands cut off because I was sick.”

Harvey had sepsis, the Associated Press reported. Sepsis is a condition that causes inflammation throughout the body and can lead to organ failure, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Due to the infection, Harvey’s feet and hands had to be amputated as a toddler.

His mother donated her kidney to him when he was 4, after he had spent two years on dialysis treatments, according to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Because he is already taking medication to ensure he doesn’t reject an organ (the kidney), the hospital reported he was a good candidate for the hand transplant surgery.

The Gift of Life Donor Program coordinated the donation of Harvey’s new hands.

“During the surgery, the hands and forearms from the donor were attached by connecting bone, blood vessels, nerves, muscles, tendons and skin,” according to a statement from the hospital, where a team of 40 worked on the operation.

After surgery, Harvey spent one week in the intensive care unit, and was eventually moved to a rehab section, where he has intensive hand therapy multiple times a day and is expected to remain for several weeks before he returns home.

The therapy is paying off, as he is using his new hands already.

His mother, Pattie Ray, told TIME that he held a piece of pizza on Monday.

“We want[ed] to really make sure that this was going to work for our patient, and work for a lifetime, not just a year,” said Benjamin Chang, M.D. “For us, this is really not just a technical exercise; it’s really trying to restore a better level of lifetime function for these patients.”

The medical team hopes the breakthrough will offer inspiration for many others.

Said Levin: “I hope he’s the first of literally hundreds or thousands of patients that are going to be afforded this operation.”

Screenshot from Zion’s story via YouTube/Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.