Double Arm Transplant on Army Solider

APP101/Stevens~Henager College

Abstract
This paper is about the newest medical double arm transplant. The surgery was recently performed on Dec 18, 2012 at John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Sergeant Brendan Marracco was the first army solider to receive this double arm transplant. He is the first army solider to be a quadruple amputee.

Double Arm Transplant on Army Solider On December 18, 2012 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, a team of doctors and nurses performed a rare double arm transplant. The surgery lasted 13 hours long and involved 16 physicians from orthopedics, vascular medicine, plastic surgery, and others from five hospitals.
Sergeant Brendan Marrocco age 26 is the first service member from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to survive the loss of four limbs. He became a quadruple amputee after an explosion in Iraq three years ago. He lost both legs above the knee, his left arm below the elbow and his right arm above the elbow when a military vehicle he was driving was struck by a powerful makeshift bomb on Easter 2009. Brendan Marrocco is the first service member to receive a double arm transplant, and the hospital said he is one of only seven people in the United States who have undergone successful double arm transplants. It’s been a little over a month now and his father said he is doing well. He can flex his left arm at the elbow and slightly rotating his wrist, the feelings in his hands have not returned yet. His doctors said nerves regrow at about an inch per month, so given the length of his arm; it will take several months to more than a year for most normal arm movements to occur for Brendan. As for the surgery, two different approaches were involved for each arm to preserve Brendan’s remaining limbs. Dr. Andrew Lee is who headed the transplant team at John Hopkins Hospital. Dr. Lee said the right arm had an above-elbow transplant by connecting the bone, muscles, blood vessels, nerves and skin between the donor and Brendan (John Hopkins Medical , 2012). For the left side, the elbow joint was preserved, and some of the nerves, so the transplant team transplanted the entire donor forearm muscles over his remaining tissues, then rerouted the nerves to the new muscle. Because the difficulty of the procedure in connecting all the tissues together, the transplant team practiced on cadaver arms four times over a span of 18 months before the surgery.
As with any transplant, the risk of rejection is high. The Hopkins team came up with an innovative approach of infusing Brendan with bone marrow cells taken from the donor’s lower