Doctors Perform Successful Hand Transplant
DONNA KELLEY, CNN ANCHOR: A 36-year-old gutter-installer from Michigan has become the second person in the United States to receive a hand transplant. A team of surgeons in Kentucky performed the 13- hour operation overnight. Jerry Fisher is now recovering and is expected to be able to use his new hand in a few days. CNN's medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen joins us now with more. Elizabeth, hi.</s>ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Hi Donna. Surgeons say the patient, Fisher, is doing great. He's joking with his surgeons, he's hanging out with his family. The operation involved 18 surgeons and five anesthesiologists. Fisher had been waiting for this moment for a long time. He lost his left hand in 1996 in a firecracker accident on the Fourth of July. Then yesterday doctors located a heartbeating, brain-dead donor with the same size hand as Fisher. It was a long operation because they had to attach 27 bones, 28 muscles, two main arteries, tendons, veins and soft tissue. Here you will see the donor hand coming into the operating room in a cooler. It was carried in and attached. Surgeons spent 13 hours in this operation. They had to use microscopes to see a lot of what they were doing. At the end of the procedure, the arm was stitched to -- was all stitched together. Here we see it, and surgeons say it will look a lot better in a few weeks.</s>DR. WARREN BREIDENBACH, HAND TRANSPLANT SURGEON: This went very smoothly, and it took us 13 hours. The patient is now in recovery, actually back on the floor. And really, I can't be more pleased with the way things have turned out.</s>COHEN: Now let's take a look at exactly how they did this procedure. Doctors first attached the bones with metal plates. And then they had to attach the tendons. Well, here you see the bones coming together and there are the plates that will hold the bones together. There are plates on the side as well as plates on the top. And then they had to attach the tendons, and they tested each one. You can see those little fingers wiggling by pulling on the tendons. They did the same process on the top of the hand. They then connected the nerves and arteries. The hand was then flipped back over, the arteries were attached, the hand sewn back up together as soon as that was attached. And as they flipped it over they had to do more of the arteries there. You can see that going together. Now, when Fisher decided to undergo this procedure he undertook a lot of risks. He'll have to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of his life, and these drugs suppress the immune system and can cause kidney problems, diabetes and even death. We visited Fisher two months ago. He's a motorcycle enthusiast and he said he's ready to take those risks. He is the father of three and he says one of the main reasons he decided to do the surgery, he said, with a hook on the end of his arm it's hard to be tender with his new baby son. Now hand transplants have had a bit of a tricky history. Just last week the man who received the first transplant, which was in France in 1998, had to have his hand amputated because he didn't keep taking the anti-rejection drugs. The first U.S. hand transplant recipient, Matthew Scott, had his transplant done by the same team that did last night's operation. Doctors say he's doing well, and has a good deal of function in his wrists and fingers. The lead surgeon says he expects Jerry Fisher to do as well or even better.</s>KELLEY: That's fascinating. Elizabeth Cohen, thanks. I'm surprised; it's interesting to me how the brain can get the signals then to the other -- to the new hand.</s>COHEN: It's amazing. If everything goes right, it just accepts it. The only two things they really had to be careful about were the blood type and size. Other than that, it'll hopefully just take it right out.</s>KELLEY: OK; Elizabeth Cohen, thank you.